Three Essays In The Economics Of Law And Language

(cont.) The parameters of the negotiation model and the judges' ideological inclinations are then estimated on a data set of sex discrimination cases using maximum likelihood estimation. The results find strong evidence that judges' votes are influenced by their panel colleagues, but that this influence mostly takes the form of outvoted judges joining the majority. However, judges in the minority appear to have a small but significant effect on case outcomes. The third chapter examines the impact of liability law on firms' investments in product safety when such investments take the form of fixed costs and liability does not apply equally to competing products. Using a model with one innovative good and one competitively supplied good, the paper finds that asymmetric liability deters safety innovation when the administration of the tort system is inefficient. When inefficiencies in the tort system are small, however, incentives to develop safer products may be stronger under asymmetric liability.

In the first paper, I employ long-term event study analysis to analyze a puzzle in investor response to corporate expatriations, and expose a significant gap in the regulatory regime applicable to inversions that explains the puzzle.