法律翻译 |《法与经济学杂志》第65卷第1期

译者 | 杜怡萱 清华大学法学辅修

审稿 | 曾梓栩 外交学院本科

         俞悠悠 国际关系学院本科

编辑 | 李薇 浙江工商大学本科

         李建云 湖南师范大学本科

责编 | 王有蓉 中国政法大学硕士

Many US states have regulations that restrict the ability of franchisors to terminate franchise contracts. We estimate the economic effects of these regulations with a focus on how they impact market structure. Using data from the quick-service restaurant industry, we find that implementing franchise regulations results in 4–5 percent fewer establishments in the average county. Our results imply that franchise regulation leads to increased concentration in a large number of markets, as the number of counties in the bottom quartile of concentration would increase by between 12 percent and 15 percent with regulation.

Prosecutors enjoy wide discretion in the decisions they make but are largely unstudied by quantitative empirical scholars. This paper explores gender bias in prosecutorial decision-making. I find that male and female prosecutors exhibit small and statistically insignificant differences in their treatment of defendants overall but demonstrate relative leniency toward defendants of their own gender. Such favoritism at charging translates into a sentencing gap of roughly 5 months of incarceration for defendants who are paired with an own-gender prosecutor versus an opposite-gender prosecutor, which represents a roughly 8 percent reduction in sentence length at the mean. The estimates do not appear to be driven by differences in case assignments for male and female prosecutors.

We quantify the sensitivity of investments to policy uncertainty by drawing on the Northern Pacific’s massive land grant and the ensuing political battle that generated significant uncertainty to title from 1879 to 1894. Focusing on irrigation because of its high asset specificity, our analysis exploits the spatially exogenous extent of the grant to identify causal effects on investment, inclusive of spillovers to secure land because coordinated investment is generally necessary to capture the scale economies of irrigation. We find that the uncertainty significantly deterred and delayed irrigation investment in Montana, which lowered the state’s economic activity by up to 5 percent. Large numbers of settlers are occupying such [railroad grant] lands, and it is important to them to know whether they can receive their titles from the United States, or whether they will be required to purchase from the railroad companies. The prevailing uncertainty necessarily retards improvements and impairs values. (Noah C. McFarland, General Land Office Commissioner, US Department of the Interior 1882, p. 11)

（图片来源于网络）

Shareholder litigation has long played a central but highly controversial role in American corporate governance. In 2014, the Delaware Supreme Court took a step that had the potential to dramatically reduce the amount of such litigation. In its landmark decision in ATP Tour, Inc. v. Deutscher Tennis Bund, the court embraced the legality of so-called fee-shifting bylaws. Such bylaws typically require plaintiff-shareholders to bear a corporation’s litigation expenses if their suit does not succeed. Only a year later, however, the Delaware legislature overruled ATP by promulgating a ban on fee-shifting provisions. From a policy perspective, the crucial question is whether allowing fee-shifting bylaws benefits shareholders. Although many scholars have weighed in on this issue, no empirical study has examined the ATP decision’s impact on shareholder wealth. This article fills that gap. Using a hand-collected data set on fee-shifting provisions, I show that the legalization of fee-shifting bylaws reduced shareholder wealth.

A model is provided whereby a monopolist firm chooses to price its product at 0. This outcome is shown to be driven by the assumption of free disposal alongside selection markets (where prices impact a firm’s costs). Free disposal creates a mass point of consumers whose utility from the product is 0. When costs are negative, the paper shows that a zero-price equilibrium can emerge. The paper shows that this outcome can be socially optimal and that, while a move from monopoly to competition can result in a negative price equilibrium, this can be welfare reducing. The conclusion is that 0 can be a special zone with respect to policy analysis such as in antitrust.

本文提供了一个模型，在这个模型中，垄断公司将其产品定价为0。这个结果被证明是由自由处分和选择市场（价格影响公司成本）的假设推动的。自由处分创造了大量消费者，他们在产品中获得的效用是0。本文表明，当成本为负时，可能会出现一个0价格均衡点，这个结果可能是社会最优的。而从垄断向竞争的转变会造成负价格均衡，这可能会减少福利。结论是，在反垄断等政策分析领域中，0可以成为一个特殊区域。

（图片来源于网络）

We study a land-titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to right holders. Ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes did not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this increase in litigation reflects the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low-value parcels that, under the customary system, were optimal to keep unclarified.Consistent with this explanation, we find that the increase in litigation took place among households that plausibly own land of lower value.

We examine whether corporate boards factor the potential cost of competitive harm caused by a departing chief executive officer (CEO) into their forced-turnover decisions. Using staggered changes in the state-level enforceability of a covenant not to compete (CNC) for identification, we find that enhanced enforceability of CNCs increases both the likelihood of forced CEO turnover and the sensitivity of forced CEO turnover to firm performance. We present additional cross-sectional evidence that shows that such effects are more pronounced when firms face more severe product market threats or operate in industries with greater potential threats of predatory hiring. Investors react to turnover announcements more positively when enforceability increases, which indicates that enhanced enforceability of CNCs increases efficiency in decisions to replace CEOs.