法律翻译 | 《法与经济学杂志》第59卷第2期

译者 | 孙   沛 南开大学

审稿 | 左亦惟 中南财经政法大学

         罗兰西 Cornell LL.M.

编辑 | 向芯雨 西南交通大学

         王冰子 烟台大学

责编 | 李   薇 浙江工商大学

The Journal of Law and Economics Volume 59, Number 2 | 2016 

放宽职业许可要求：医疗服务工资与价格的分析

Morris M. Kleiner, Allison Marier, Kyoung Won Park, and Coady Wing

Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of US states to give nurse practitioners the ability to perform more tasks without the supervision of medical doctors. We investigate how these regulations affect wages, hours worked, and the prevailing transaction prices and quality levels associated with certain types of medical services. We find that when nurse practitioners have more independence in their scope of practice, their wages are higher but physicians’ wages are lower, which suggests some substitution between the occupations. Our analysis of insurance claims data shows that more rigid regulations increase the price of a well-child visit by 3–16 percent. However, we find no evidence that the changes in regulatory policy are reflected in outcomes that might be connected to the quality and safety of health services.

人们为什么不信任专家？

Nathaniel G. Hilger

Credence goods such as health care, legal and financial services, and auto repair create a conflict of interest by requiring experts to diagnose and provide services to uninformed consumers. Mistreatment of consumers appears widespread empirically, but a simple explanation for mistreatment under realistic assumptions has proved elusive. I generalize Uwe Dulleck and Rudolf Kerschbamer’s credence-good model to incorporate the highly realistic assumption that consumers do not observe experts’ cost functions. The model guarantees equilibrium mistreatment in a wide range of price-setting and market environments. The model also yields testable implications regarding the nature of mistreating firms and the direction of mistreatment.

在医疗、法律、金融服务及某些汽车维修服务等典型的信任品（译者注：信任品（Credence goods）是指一些消费者在使用后也难以确认其质量的产品。）服务领域，往往由专家为信息不对称的消费者进行鉴定并提供服务，从而产生利益冲突。根据实证研究，这些信任品服务领域中对消费者的不当待遇似乎很普遍，但在现实假设下对不当待遇的简单解释却尚付阙如。本文对乌韦·杜勒克（Uwe Dulleck）和鲁道夫·克施巴默（Rudolf Kerschbamer）的“信誉—利益”（credence-good）模型加以推广，补充了一个高度现实的假设，即消费者无法观察到专家的成本函数（译者注：成本函数（cost function）指在技术水平和要素价格不变的条件下，成本与产出之间的相互关系。）。该模型证实了在各种价格设定和市场环境中稳定存在的针对消费者的不当待遇。该模型还可检验对消费者存在不当对待企业的性质及方向。

内生性财产权

Carmine Guerriero

Although property rights are key, their determinants are still poorly understood. When property is fully protected, some potential buyers with valuation higher than that of original owners are inefficiently excluded from trade because of transaction costs. When property rights are weak, low-valuation potential buyers inefficiently expropriate original owners. The trade-off between these two misallocations implies that the protection of property will be stronger the more heterogeneous the potential buyer’s preferences are. This implication holds true when part of the population has more political influence on institutional design, when transaction costs are determined by either market power or asymmetric information, and when the disincentive effect of weak property rights is taken into account. Moreover, it is consistent with the relationships between measures of ethnolinguistic, genetic, and religious diversity and novel data on the rules on adverse possession and on government takings of real property in 126 jurisdictions.

财产权十分重要，但人们对其决定要素知之甚少。当财产权受到充分保护时，由于交易成本，一些估值高于原始所有者的潜在买家被低效地排除在交易之外。当财产权的保护力度较弱时，低估值的潜在买家会低效地征用原始所有者的财产。这两种错配之间的权衡意味着，潜在买家的偏好越异质，对财产权的保护力度就越大。该结论成立的条件如下：1.一部分人对制度设计具有更大的政治影响力；2.交易成本由市场力量或信息不对称决定；3.考虑产权保护薄弱的抑制效应。本文实证研究了126个司法管辖区内的逆权侵占（adverse possession）规定，以及政府征收不动产与民族语言、基因和宗教多样性的关系，研究结果亦与上述结论吻合。

（图片来源于网络）

论受监管行业反垄断责任的利弊

Arup Bose, Debashis Pal, and 

David E. M. Sappington

We examine the merits of subjecting an incumbent supplier of regulated services to antitrust review. We show that antitrust review can harm consumers even when the review entails no direct costs of implementation. The harm to consumers arises in part because imperfect antitrust review can crowd out more effective regulatory oversight. More generally, antitrust review can usefully complement regulatory oversight but affects the nature of the optimal regulatory policy.

仲裁与诉讼处理合同纠纷的经济分析

Abraham L. Wickelgren

This paper considers the efficiency of arbitration clauses when the firm can choose a degree of bias in the arbitration process and only some fraction of consumers can observe this bias. If the proportion of informed consumers is not too small, then there is an equilibrium at which all consumers trade, there is some pro-firm bias, and, as a result, there is excessive breach. The paper then compares the firm’s incentive to include an arbitration clause with the social incentive. The firm’s incentive does not mirror the socially optimal incentive: it could have either an excessive or insufficient incentive to include an arbitration clause, but under fairly broad conditions the firm will not choose an arbitration clause when court adjudication would be more efficient.

本文研究了当企业在选择是否仲裁过程中存在某种程度的偏向，且仅有一部分消费者可以观察到这种偏向时，仲裁条款的效率问题。假如知情消费者的比例不太低，就会达到一种均势状态。这种状态下会存在一些有利于公司的偏向，结果就会导致过度违约。在此基础上，本文比较了企业引入仲裁条款的动机与社会动机。企业的动机与社会最优动机并不一致：企业引入仲裁条款的动机可能过度，也可能不足。但在相当宽泛的条件下，当法院裁决更有效时，企业就不会选择仲裁条款。

（图片来源于网络）

私人著作权保护是否有效？

来自图书出版业的证据

Imke Reimers

Digitization has impacted publishing, news, and entertainment industries in recent years by lowering the cost of access. With the option to download creative works legally, however, come the possibility of doing so illegally and the issue of how to protect copyrighted works effectively. Public (legislative) and formal (legal) efforts to prevent copyright infringements have been controversial or inefficient. The book industry showcases an alternative approach in which private companies use relatively inexpensive network surveillance to protect individual titles. I estimate the effectiveness of such protection on legal sales of books that become protected using a difference-in-differences approach. I find a protection-related increase in sales of electronic books—the closest substitute for online piracy—of more than 14 percent, with effectiveness depending on popularity, genre, and search frequency. Most of the increase is due to prevention of casual infringements rather than professional piracy.

近年来，数字化降低了信息获取成本，进而对出版业、新闻业和娱乐业造成影响。然而，随着人们可以合法下载原创作品，非法下载的可能性也随之而来，如何有效保护著作权是需要面对的问题。在公共（立法）和正式（法律）层面防止著作权侵权的努力一直备受争议或被认为效率低下。图书出版业提供了另一种方案，即私营企业利用相对低成本的网络监控来保护个人权利。本文采用差分法估算了该方案保护图书合法销售的有效性。研究表明，以与网络盗版形式最接近的电子图书为例，受保护的电子图书销售量增长超过14%，其有效性取决于受欢迎程度、类型和检索频率。大部分销售量增长是由于防止了偶然的侵权行为而非职业侵权。

Power to the People: Does Ownership Type Influence Electricity Service?

权力在民：所有权类型会影响电力服务吗？

Richard T. Boylan

After storm-related power outages, many have recommended municipalizing investor-owned utilities, claiming that profit-making utilities have insufficient incentive to prepare for storms. I provide empirical evidence that municipal utilities spend more on maintenance of their distribution network than investor-owned utilities. Nonetheless, I find that storms significantly disrupt electricity consumption in areas served by municipal utilities but do not disrupt areas served by investor-owned utilities. These results are based on a stratified random sample of 241 investor-owned, 96 cooperative, and 94 municipal utilities in the United States between 1999 and 2012. I conclude that municipal utilities’ in-efficiencies are more important in causing power outages than investor-owned utilities’ disincentives to spend on maintenance.

在风暴灾害造成电力中断后，许多人提议将民营公用事业纳入国营，理由是营利性公用事业企业没有足够的动力为风暴灾害做准备。本文通过实证研究，证明国营公用事业企业维护配电网络的成本比民营公用事业企业更高。且风暴严重干扰了国营公用事业服务区域的电力使用，但没有扰乱民营公用事业服务区域。上述结果基于1999年至2012年间，美国241个民营事业企业、96个公私合作事业企业和94个国营公用事业企业的分层随机样本。本文的结论是，国营公用事业企业的效率低下比民营公用事业企业的克制维护支出更易造成电力中断。

（图片来源于网络）

Bargaining in the Absence of Property Rights: An Experiment

没有财产权的交易：一项实验

Oren Bar-Gill and Christoph Engel

The Coase theorem posits that if (1) property rights are perfect, (2) contracts are perfectly enforceable, (3) transaction costs are zero, (4) preferences are common knowledge, and (5) parties are rational, then the initial allocation of entitlements matters only for distribution, not for efficiency. We study, in an experimental setting, whether condition 1 is necessary. Our results suggest that property rights have a limited effect on efficiency.

原文链接：

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jle/2016/59/2

参考文献：

[1]译者注：根据Herman E. Daly, Allocation, distribution, and scale: towards an economics that is efficient, just, and sustainable,Ecological Economics, Volume 6, Issue 3, 1992, Pages 185-193, 配给（allocation）是一个较为新古典主义经济学（neoclassical economics）的概念，强调资源的有效分配，更注重规划和效率；分配（distribution）是一个较为生态经济学（ecological economics）的概念，强调在不同代际、人群之间的公正分配，更注重公平和可持续。