Efficient Liability Rules: Complete Characterization

Received May, 18, 2000; revised version received March, 19, 2001     

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives in all sets of a given profile and the difference between the number of alternatives in the individual sets. We also show that, under additional axioms, we can combine these criteria only in a weighted procedure or in some lexicographic refinements of a weighted procedure.      

Bank Monitoring and Environmental Risk

Abstract:  Loan announcement effects for 152 Canadian companies are examined to investigate the efficiency of monitoring by banks facing lender environmental liability. Market reaction to the announcement of bank debt to 'environmental' firms is more positive and significant than for 'non-environmental' firms and, for firms in industries with a higher likelihood of experiencing spill events, is more positive and significant, reinforcing earlier results that establish a relationship between specific loan/borrower characteristics and announcement period excess returns and providing further evidence on the 'uniqueness' of bank loans by demonstrating the superior ability of banks to monitor corporate borrowers exposed to environmental liability.