This dissertation empirically examines three distinct instances of immigration federalism. Though immigration law and policy is inherently federal, state and local governments have recently implemented various laws and policies that implicate the immigrant population in the United States. This trend, known as immigration federalism, has resulted in a jurisdictional patchwork of laws and policies nationwide. Chapter I studies Official English laws, which require that all official government business be conducted in the English language. This chapter examines the labor market impacts of the state-level modern Official English movement on the limited English proficient workforce. Chapter II provides a nationwide empirical analysis of the labor market impacts of 287(g) agreements, which are signed by local governments and allow federal immigration authorities to deputize local officers. Chapter III examines a different type of local body: the immigration court. While immigration courts are a part of the federal immigration system, each court must autonomously manage the backlog of cases in its docket. My analysis examines the impact of case backlog on both the duration of immigration cases and the final decision in each immigration case.

This dissertation seeks to shed further light on the issue of concussions in athleticsâa topic that has garnered increased attention over the past decade. Chapter 1 examines youth sports concussion laws, which have now been implemented by every state. Specifically, I study the impact that these state laws have on participation in high school athletics and the reporting of youth concussions. Chapter 2 looks at how risk and compensation schemes related to concussions currently operate at the youth, college, and professional levels of football. This chapter then provides recommendations for how risk-management systems can be implemented at each level so as to promote levels of risk and compensation that are closer to the optimal level than currently exist. Chapter 3 studies how commitment and payment schemes affect risk-taking behavior through the use of an incentivized experiment. In doing so, I analogize these risk decisions to those faced by professional football players, who must decide whether to continue their careers in the face of potential long-term health effects due to concussions.

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Thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 1999. / Typescript. "August 1999." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-280). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis is about access control in the health care sector. Access control is a function in It-systems that allows authorized users to access data they have right to access, prevents unauthorized users from accessing data and prevents authorized users from disclosing data unlawfully. One of the pillars of access control is that a user only is authorized to access data that he or she needs to perform a task. This describes the principle of least privilege and its objective is to ensure data's confidentiality and integrity. In the health care sector where an increasing number of public and private actors are processing sensitive data the application of this principle is essential to protect patients' privacy and confidence in the system. The lawmaker has incorporated the principle of least privilege in legal bodies such as the General Data Protection Regulation, Patient Data Act and the regulation of registers that allow processing of health data. This thesis examines how the lawmaker has incorporated the principle of least privilege to protect health data. Therefore, it examines access control regulation, in particular, requirements on management of access rights and log audits. The lawmaker has applied this principle through requirements on the system that should be incorporated by default and through requirements on management of access rights. The conclusion is that given that the tendency in health care, like in other sectors, is toward automation and more focus on self-care, the requirements should be directed more to systems than medical staff.

Trade marks are information carriers through which direct contact between buyers and sellers is obtained and maintained. In today’s consumer society, which is overburdened with increasingly subtle and artificial product differentiation, most purchasing decisions would be difficult without any feedback mechanism between the products on offer and potential consumers. Accordingly, producers need a symbol that is capable of providing this feedback by conveying the relevant information about the products to consumers, without boring or over-educating them. On the other hand, consumers need a symbol to guide their choice and express their preferences. To convey this information in an effective manner there must be a clear link with the producer, or at least the commercial entity responsible for marketing the product. The most convenient and effective way of establishing this link would be through the product’s trade mark. Nonetheless, modern business and marketing practices are increasingly driving a change in the role of trade marks from consumer protection tools to investment protection tools. This significant change has created a deep tension at the heart of trade mark law and has hindered attempts to formulate a coherent body of law. Accordingly, this thesis examines the causes of this tension by evaluating the current European trade marks protection system and its contributions towards promoting free competition and enhancing social and economic welfare. In addition, this thesis tests the developing national and Community trade mark decisions against economic arguments to judge how these decisions are responding to and dealing with the tension within the law. Moreover, the thesis explores how the law can avoid the problem of over or under protection by establishing a balance between protection of and access to trade marks rights. To achieve this goal the responsible authorities must resolve the fundamental challenges of ‘what do we want to protect in a trade mark?’ and leading on from this, ‘what is the scope of an efficient system of trade marks protection?’ Furthermore, this thesis considers how the trade marks system should deal with the wider economic functions of trade marks and their implications for the specific topics of dilution, comparative advertising and parallel importation. Finally, the thesis concludes by calling for the creation of a balanced trade mark protection system through the application of the legal and economic tools indentified throughout this study.

This dissertation will take a theoretical approach to analyzing certain challenges in the design of intellectual property rights (`IPR') policy. The first essay looks the advisability of introducing IPR into a market which is currently only very lightly protected - the US fashion industry. The proposed Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act is intended to introduce EU standards into the US. Using a sequential, 2-firm, vertical differentiation framework, I analyze the effects of protection on investment in innovative designs by high-quality (`designer') and lower-quality (`mass-market') firms when the mass-marketer may opt to imitate, consumers prefer trendsetting designs and firms compete in prices. I show that design protection, by transforming mass-marketers from imitators to innovators, may reduce both designer pro ts and welfare. The model provides possible explanations for the dearth of EU case law and the increase in designer/mass-marketer collaborations. The second essay contributes to the literature on patent design and fee shifting, contrasting the effects of the American (or `each party pays') rule and English (or `losing party pays') rule of legal cost allocation on optimal patent breadth when innovation is sequential and firms are differentiated duopolists. I show that if litigation spending is endogenous, the American rule may induce broader patents and a higher probability of infringement than the English rule if R&D costs are sufficiently low. If, however, R&D costs are moderate, the ranking is reversed and it is the English rule that leads to broader patents. Neither rule supports lower patent breadth than the other over the entire parameter space. As such, any attempts to reform the US patent system by narrowing patents must carefully weigh the impact on firms' legal spending decisions if policymakers do not wish to adversely affect investment incentives. The third and final essay analyzes the effects of corporate structure on licensing behaviour. Policymakers and legal scholars are concerned about the potential for an Anticommons, an underuse of early stage research tools to produce complex final products, typically arising from either blocking or stacking. I use a simple, one-period differentiated duopoly model to show that if patentees have flexibility in corporate structure, Anticommons problems are greatly reduced. The model suggests that if the patentee owns the single (or single set) of essential IPR and goods are of symmetric quality, Anticommons issues may be entirely eliminated, as the patentee will always license, simply shifting its corporate structure depending on the identity of the downstream competitor. If the rival produces a more valuable good, Anticommons problems are reduced. Further, if the patentee holds 1 of 2 essential patents, the ability to shift its corporate structure may reduce total licensing costs to rival firms. However the analysis offers a cautionary note: while spin-offs by the patentee help to sustain downstream competition, they may restrict market output, and therefore welfare. Thus the inefficiency in the patent system may be in the opposite direction than is currently thought - there may be too much technology transfer, rather than too little.

<p>This dissertation comprises of three essays in law and economics. The first chapter, a joint work with my advisor - Marjorie McElroy, examines the longly debated effect of the liberalized divorce laws in the United States on the divorce rates during 1956-1989. The first and the second chapter are a theoretical and an empirical paper on a cooperative game of bribery.</p> / Dissertation

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This paper explores the monopsonistic implications of restricting bargaining power through the rookie draft and the concept of countervailing forces. It examines both the legal framework and the empirical outcomes of the court’s policy choices. This paper accomplishes this inquiry by exploiting the fact that players drafted late in the last round tend to be similar to players selected as undrafted free agents in expectation. This allows a natural experiment on the impact of the draft. In order to measure the impact of the draft, this paper examines career outcomes both in terms of compensation and length. I ultimately find little evidence that the draft creates monopsony power, and I provide some evidence suggesting that monopsony power impacts all rookies, as one would expect from an insider-outsider model.