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<p>The thesis consists in two parts. The purpose of the first part is to analyse how the court may interpret rules, principles and legal cases to decide whether a reconstructor bears liability towards the debtor and the creditors. In the second part it is discussed and argued for how the reconstructor´s damage liability should be drawn up and applied so that it according to economic theories should be as efficient as possible. In the thesis it is shown that it is not a non-contractual liability or a liability based on authority mission. The reconstructor´s liability is instead based on a commission concerning an intellectual service. The court is the mandator of the commission, but the debtor must be regarded as the principal. The reconstructor is liable towards the debtors on contractual grounds, the relationship can be considered as equivalent to contract. The reconstrucotr´s liablity does not fall under the limitation rules in HB 18:9 but falls under the limitation rules in Preskriptionslagen. In the second part, dealing with theories of Law and Economics, it is shown that a negligence rule is the most efficient. The reconstructor´s liability, according to the analysis of Swedish law, would thereby be efficient. A problem lies however in the fact that the parties does not know for sure which liability rule that is in force. This is inefficient while it can lead to that the parties observes a too low activity level, observes a too low level of care or take too many, costly, safety measures. This problem can best be solved through a non-mandatory law which allows the parties to rely entirely on the law or to make a contract where the gaps are being covered by the law.</p>

The thesis consists in two parts. The purpose of the first part is to analyse how the court may interpret rules, principles and legal cases to decide whether a reconstructor bears liability towards the debtor and the creditors. In the second part it is discussed and argued for how the reconstructor´s damage liability should be drawn up and applied so that it according to economic theories should be as efficient as possible. In the thesis it is shown that it is not a non-contractual liability or a liability based on authority mission. The reconstructor´s liability is instead based on a commission concerning an intellectual service. The court is the mandator of the commission, but the debtor must be regarded as the principal. The reconstructor is liable towards the debtors on contractual grounds, the relationship can be considered as equivalent to contract. The reconstrucotr´s liablity does not fall under the limitation rules in HB 18:9 but falls under the limitation rules in Preskriptionslagen. In the second part, dealing with theories of Law and Economics, it is shown that a negligence rule is the most efficient. The reconstructor´s liability, according to the analysis of Swedish law, would thereby be efficient. A problem lies however in the fact that the parties does not know for sure which liability rule that is in force. This is inefficient while it can lead to that the parties observes a too low activity level, observes a too low level of care or take too many, costly, safety measures. This problem can best be solved through a non-mandatory law which allows the parties to rely entirely on the law or to make a contract where the gaps are being covered by the law.

Behavioral economics is widely recognized as a rising field in economics, one whose discoveries and implications are not yet completed or understood. At the same time, economic theory plays an enormous role in our governmental and legal system. In particular, the Coase Theorem and its implications have affected nearly every area in the field of law and economics. This paper proposes a experimental test of Coasean bargaining in situations using two competitive players whose payoffs depend on minimizing their costs of mitigating the externality. A rational player’s action can be predicted ahead of time, and the rationality of the game’s outcome can be objectively measured. If behavioral effects found in consumer goods situations by other experimenters carry over to competitive business situations, then a substantial review of law regarding such situations is in order.

<p>This dissertation is a collection of three chapters all pertaining to institutional economics. In short, the eld of institutional economics is an outgrowth of public economics, in the sense that in many cases he key institutions that frame economic decisionmaking are the product of public policy. However this is not exclusive. Institutional economics' key contribution is the acknowledgement that cultural and social institutions --- often developed organically over the course of centuries --- can play as signicant a role in individuals' economic choices as governmental policy. In the pages that follow, we will address the economic impact of cultural and political institutions in three contexts: Judicial decisionmaking in Islamic courts, the effects</p><p>of negative health shocks on retirement savings, and the tradeoff between retirement savings and investment in durable goods.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation contains two chapters on law and economics and one chapter on international trade. An important but under-researched issue for medical malpractice (med-mal) litigation is how physicians' previous medical malpractice experiences affect their behaviour. Using Florida data on closed med-mal claims, I find that if physicians have prior paid claims, their current litigation is resolved faster and is associated with less cost. Having a prior payout does not significantly predict the likelihood or the amount of the current payout. This suggests that ``learning'' occurs as a result of prior med-mal experience. As a theoretical motivation, I developed a dynamic version of the divergent expectations (DE) litigation model. The model predicts, consistent with the data, that physicians have a more realistic analysis of med-mal litigation if they have prior experience. Many robustness checks are carried out to test the results, including using a fixed effect framework, to which the results are robust. In the second chapter, we investigate the impact of ``duty to settle'' rule in predicting patterns in data. Prior models and studies of settlement ignore the insurer's ``duty to settle'' -- the obligation to settle within policy limits if it would be unreasonable to refuse a within-limits settlement offer. We incorporate the duty to settle into a structural model of settlement of medical malpractice claims, and then estimate the model using maximum likelihood methods applied to a Texas closed claims database. Both the data and our model predict: a mass of cases with a settlement demand by the plaintiff exactly at limits; a smaller but still sizeable mass of cases with settlement exactly at limits; very few above-limits payments by insureds; and when above-limits payments are made, they are often by insurers. The model does a reasonable job in predicting data moments, including fractions of cases settled at limits, settled above limits, and tried. Using the model in counterfactual analysis, we predict: (i) with no duty to settle, more cases will be tried; (ii) with strict insurer liability for not settling within limits, there will be fewer trials and more above limits payments by insurers; and (iii) the duty to settle will rarely cause insurers to pay more than the expected value of claims. The third chapter of this dissertation is on international trade. There is a well established literature on the impact of sovereign debt renegotiation on bilateral trade, including Rose (2005) among others. However, there is no study that disentangles impacts of renegotiation on the intensive and extensive margins, where the former is the trade volume of established bilateral trading relationships and the latter is the number of established relationships. This study employs the UNComTrade dataset and debt renegotiation data from the Paris Club for over 150 countries in order to address the impact of a debt renegotiation on the extensive margin of trade. This paper finds that bilateral trade volume declines following a sovereign debt renegotiation. The result is robust to the use of trade lags as instrumental variables to address endogeneity. Consistent with the trade literature, this study documents a negative impact of a debt renegotiation on the trade value using the Tobit approach in a fixed effect model, to appropriately handle censored data. Interestingly, a comparison between the marginal impacts of a debt renegotiation on the extensive and the intensive margins shows that the former effect has at least the same magnitude as the latter. / text

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La structure de la réglementation des valeurs mobilières au Canada fait périodiquement l'objet d'un débat public et une des questions sous-jacentes est celle du partage des compétences législatives prévu par la Constitution canadienne. Le débat a été relancé en 2003 par la recommandation d'un comité de personnes averties de centraliser cette réglementation au fédéral. Les provinces, sauf l'Ontario, demeurent opposées à l'idée, préférant plutôt l'harmonisation réglementaire. Pour alléger le fardeau réglementaire des émetteurs, elles tentent également de mettre en oeuvre un « régime de passeport ». Ce débat présente la question comme un jeu à somme nulle, occultant ainsi certains principes fondamentaux du fédéralisme: innovation provinciale dans une union économique nationale. Dans ce mémoire, nous proposons donc une structure réglementaire, basée sur la théorie de la concurrence intergouvernementale, qui s'harmonise avec les compétences du gouvernement fédéral et des provinces tout en optimisant leurs atouts respectifs. / Public debate over the structure of Canada's securities regulation occurs periodically, with the constitution al division of powers being one of its underlying issues. The debate was reignited in 2003 when a Wise Persons Committee recommended that securities be regulated centrally by the federal government. The provinces, other than Ontario, maintain their opposition to this proposai, seeking instead regulatory harmonization. To alleviate the regulatory burden on issuers, the provinces are also implementing a "passport system". However, the debate appears to present the alternatives as a zero-sum game, thereby overlooking some of federalism's fundamental principles: provincial innovation, within a national economic union. This thesis proposes a regulatory structure, based on the theory of intergovernmental competition, that remains in harmony with the constitutional powers of the federal government and the provinces, while optimizing their respective strengths. / "Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de LL.M. en Droit des affaires". Ce mémoire a été accepté à l'unanimité et classé parmi les 10% des mémoires de la discipline. Commentaires du jury : "Le jury tient à souligner l'ampleur des recherches effectuées, la parfaite intégration des considérations juridiques et économiques et la présentation très soignée de l'ensemble du mémoire".

This thesis asks the following fundamental question: to what extent can economic and social rights be made effective through law? Because this question touches at once upon the effectiveness of these rights and on their status as norms of positive law, attempting to answer it requires first, an openness to other disciplines, and subsequently, to the question of the respect and control of these norms, namely that of sanction. From the outset, a preliminary and multidisciplinary analysis of the issue of contemporary poverty hints at an undeniable deviation with "pure legal theory". Moreover, economic and social rights are becoming more and more tangible in national legislation and more frequently invoked before the court (who is turn are showing a growing openness). 'Hard law' does have a place in this implementation, notably a symbolic one. Thus, the first part is dedicated to the determination of the role of 'hard law' as well as to the relevance of judicial activism. Given the limitations of 'hard law', the second part examines the issue of alternate courses of State action as opposed to any other demands for rights. Two forms of 'soft' and 'reflexive' law will then be examined in the interest of rendering economic and social rights effective: respectively from within the State, and from outside its framework. First, strategic planning (accompanied by outcome-based management) may serve to coordinate the State apparatus in the struggle against poverty. In what concerns the role of law at a societal level and in the context of a complex society, societal guidance will be preferred to impose strategic planning. In this way, it will be possible to shed light on other forms of sanction, which may be complimentary to legal ones. Finally, it is necessary to establish certain control and follow-up mechanisms of this category of rights, more relevant and innovative in order to garner a greater effectiveness of economic and social rights.

In the last four decades, one of the fastest-growing fields of research in economics has been the contractual theory of the firm developed in Coase’s (1937) footsteps. Yet despite what otherwise seems to be a genuine success story the question of the nature of the firm remains an empirical and theoretical challenge, painfully illustrated by the lack of consensus regarding the definition and boundaries of the firm. The argument of this thesis is that many thorny questions that plague the literature, including issues related to ownership, boundaries, and intra-firm authority, are due to the fact that contractual theorists of the firm have generally overlooked a key legal feature of the economic system, without which theories of the firm are like Hamlet without the Prince. An elementary institutional fact about firms and markets is that in order to become a fully operational firm in a modern market economy, an entrepreneur or an association of resource owners need to go through a registration or incorporation procedure by which the legal system creates a separate legal person or legal entity in which ownership rights over assets used in production are vested, in whose name contracts are made, and thanks to which the firm has standing in court. With this assignment of legal personality, the legal system creates the efficiency-enhancing nexus for contracts that literally carries the organizational framework of the firm, and secures its continuity by locking-in the founders’ committed capital, thereby allowing them to pledge assets, raise finance and do business in the firm’s own name. Given the basic principle that only legal persons may own property and have the capacity to contract, and the implication that legally enforceable contracts can only exist between legal persons, it is something of a paradox that the notion of legal personality is absent from the prevailing narrative in the contractual theory of the firm. The thesis examines the reasons behind this state of affairs, and identifies alongside the widespread view among economists that firms can be defined with little or no reference to law, particularly statutory law, the lasting influence of Jensen and Meckling’s (1976) ambiguous dismissal of legal personality as a legal fiction that unavoidably leads to misleading reification. In order to disentangle the issues involved, the thesis puts this argument into historical perspective, and suggests that much can be learned from the corporate personality controversy that in the past has addressed the same questions. As the overview of the history of this debate reveals, the category mistakes that Jensen and Meckling presented as inevitable can be easily avoided once the meaning and functions of legal personality are properly understood. The thesis dispels enduring misunderstandings surrounding the notion of personhood, and proposes a legally-grounded view of the nature and boundaries of the firm that recognizes in law’s provision of legal entity status a fundamental institutional support for the firm while fitting the overall Coasean narrative.