“[This] is certainly a masterpiece.”—Thomas S. Ulen, Journal of Economic Literature

“The strength of Shavell’s book is its lucid, structured development and explication of the economic model. It represents the best systematic presentation of the relevance of economic argument for issues of risk allocation.”—Jules L. Coleman, Yale Law Journal

“Steven Shavell…[has] drawn upon [his] previous path-breaking work to issue [one of] the most important books in the law and economics of tort law since the release in 1970 of Guido Calabresi’s The Costs of Accidents…The work is a masterful tribute to the power of economic modelling and the use of optimization techniques…I, for one, was immensely impressed by the richness of the insights that Shavell’s theoretical approach provided into the fundamental issues of tort law.”—John J. Donohue III, Harvard Law Review

Accident law, if properly designed, is capable of reducing the incidence of mishaps by making people act more cautiously. Scholarly writing on this branch of law traditionally has been concerned with examining the law for consistency with felt notions of right and duty. Since the 1960s, however, a group of legal scholars and economists have focused on identifying the effects of accident law on people’s behavior. Steven Shavell’s book is the definitive synthesis of research to date in this new field.

In the past three decades, the number of obese adults in the United States has doubled and the number of obese children almost tripled, which may lead to increased medical expenditures, productivity loss, and stress on the health care system. Economic analysis now shows that weight gain is the result of individual choices in response to economic environments and demonstrates that incentives can influence individual behaviors affecting weight. Determinants are varied and include year- and area-specific food prices, availability of food outlets and recreational facilities, health insurance, and minimum wage levels. Timely and important, Economic Aspects of Obesity provides a strong foundation for evaluating the costs and benefits of various proposals designed to control obesity rates.

Recent studies show that almost all industrial countries have experienced dramatic decreases in both fertility and mortality rates. This situation has led to aging societies with economies that suffer from both a decline in the working population and a rise in fiscal deficits linked to increased government spending. East Asia exemplifies these trends, and this volume offers an in-depth look at how long-term demographic transitions have taken shape there and how they have affected the economy in the region.

The Economic Consequences of Demographic Change in East Asia assembles a group of experts to explore such topics as comparative demographic change, population aging, the rising cost of health care, and specific policy concerns in individual countries. The volume provides an overview of economic growth in East Asia as well as more specific studies on Japan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. Offering important insights into the causes and consequences of this transition, this book will benefit students, researchers, and policy makers focused on East Asia as well as anyone concerned with similar trends elsewhere in the world.

The ever-increasing exchange of goods and ideas among nations, as well as cross-border pollution, global warming, and international crime, pose urgent questions for international law. Here, two respected scholars provide an intellectual framework for assessing these pressing legal problems from a rational choice perspective.

The approach assumes that states are rational, forward-looking agents which use international law to address the actions of other states that may have consequences for their own citizens, and to obtain the benefits of international cooperation. It further assumes that in the absence of a central enforcement agency—that is, a world government—international law must be self-enforcing. States must believe that if they violate international agreements, other states will retaliate.

Consequently, Eric A. Posner and Alan O. Sykes devote considerable attention to the challenges of enforcing international law, which begin with the difficulties of determining what it is. In the absence of an international constitution, the sources for international law are vague. Lawyers must rely on statements contained in all manner of official documents and on simple observation of states’ behavior. This looseness leads international institutions such as the United Nations to deliver conflicting interpretations of the law’s most basic principles. The authors describe the conditions under which international law succeeds or fails, across a wide range of issues, including war crimes, human rights, international criminal law, principles of state responsibility, law of the sea, international trade regulation, and international investment law.

At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion has been a prominent tool of foreign policy. In the modern era, sovereign states and multilateral institutions have imposed economic sanctions on dictatorial regimes or would-be nuclear powers as an alternative to waging war. They have conditioned offers of aid, loans, and debt relief on recipients’ willingness to implement market and governance reforms. Such methods interfere in freedom of trade and the internal affairs of sovereign states, yet are widely used as a means to advance human rights. But are they morally justifiable?

Cécile Fabre’s Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality provides the first sustained response to that question. For millennia, philosophers have explored the ethics of war, but rarely the ethics of economic carrots and sticks. Yet the issues raised could hardly be more urgent. On what grounds can we justify sanctions, in light of the harms they inflict on civilians? If, as some argue, there is a human right to basic assistance, should donors be allowed to condition the provision of aid on recipients’ willingness to do their bidding?

Drawing on human rights theories, theories of justifiable harm, and examples such as IMF lending practices and international sanctions on Russia and North Korea, Fabre offers a defense of economic statecraft in some of its guises. An empirically attuned work of philosophy, Economic Statecraft lays out a normative framework for an important tool of diplomacy.

This book takes a fresh look at the most dynamic area of American law today, comprising the fields of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, publicity rights, and misappropriation. Topics range from copyright in private letters to defensive patenting of business methods, from moral rights in the visual arts to the banking of trademarks, from the impact of the court of patent appeals to the management of Mickey Mouse. The history and political science of intellectual property law, the challenge of digitization, the many statutes and judge-made doctrines, and the interplay with antitrust principles are all examined. The treatment is both positive (oriented toward understanding the law as it is) and normative (oriented to the reform of the law).

Previous analyses have tended to overlook the paradox that expanding intellectual property rights can effectively reduce the amount of new intellectual property by raising the creators' input costs. Those analyses have also failed to integrate the fields of intellectual property law. They have failed as well to integrate intellectual property law with the law of physical property, overlooking the many economic and legal-doctrinal parallels.

This book demonstrates the fundamental economic rationality of intellectual property law, but is sympathetic to critics who believe that in recent decades Congress and the courts have gone too far in the creation and protection of intellectual property rights.

The Economic Structure of International Law presents a rationalist analysis of the structure of international law. It employs social scientific techniques to develop an understanding of the role of law in international society. In doing so, it delves into the question of compliance and reveals the real-world circumstances under which states might adhere to or violate international law.

Joel P. Trachtman explores such topics as treaty-making and jurisdiction; the rise, stability, and efficiency of custom; the establishment of international organizations; and the structure and role of international legal dispute settlement. At the core of the book lies the question of the allocation of legal power to states. The Economic Structure of International Law presents policymakers and scholars with an over-arching analytical model of international law, one that demonstrates the potential of international law, but also explains how policymakers should choose among different international legal structures.

Written by a lawyer and an economist, this is the first full-length economic study of tort law--the body of law that governs liability for accidents and for intentional wrongs such as battery and defamation. Landes and Posner propose that tort law is best understood as a system for achieving an efficient allocation of resources to safety--that, on the whole, rules and doctrines of tort law encourage the optimal investment in safety by potential injurers and potential victims.

The book contains both a comprehensive description of the major doctrines of tort law and a series of formal economic models used to explore the economic properties of these doctrines. All the formal models are translated into simple commonsense terms so that the "math less" reader can follow the text without difficulty; legal jargon is also avoided, for the sake of economists and other readers not trained in the law.

Although the primary focus is on explaining existing doctrines rather than on exploring their implementation by juries, insurance adjusters, and other "real world" actors, the book has obvious pertinence to the ongoing controversies over damage awards, insurance rates and availability, and reform of tort law-in fact it is an essential prerequisite to sound reform. Among other timely topics, the authors discuss punitive damage awards in products liability cases, the evolution of products liability law, and the problem of liability for "mass disaster" torts, such as might be produced by a nuclear accident. More generally, this book is an important contribution to the "law and economics" movement, the most exciting and controversial development in modern legal education and scholarship, and will become an obligatory reference for all who are concerned with the study of tort law.

While debates over the consequences of climate change are often pessimistic, historical data from the past two centuries indicate many viable opportunities for responding to potential changes. This volume takes a close look at the ways in which economies—particularly that of the United States—have adjusted to the challenges climate change poses, including institutional features that help insulate the economy from shocks, new crop varieties, irrigation, flood control, and ways of extending cultivation to new geographic areas. These innovations indicate that people and economies have considerable capacity to acclimate, especially when private gains complement public benefits. Options for adjusting to climate change abound, and with improved communication and the emergence of new information and technologies, the potential for adaptation will be even greater in the future.

Thomas Piketty—whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century pushed inequality to the forefront of public debate—wrote The Economics of Inequality as an introduction to the conceptual and factual background necessary for interpreting changes in economic inequality over time. This concise text has established itself as an indispensable guide for students and general readers in France, where it has been regularly updated and revised. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, The Economics of Inequality now appears in English for the first time.

Piketty begins by explaining how inequality evolves and how economists measure it. In subsequent chapters, he explores variances in income and ownership of capital and the variety of policies used to reduce these gaps. Along the way, with characteristic clarity and precision, he introduces key ideas about the relationship between labor and capital, the effects of different systems of taxation, the distinction between “historical” and “political” time, the impact of education and technological change, the nature of capital markets, the role of unions, and apparent tensions between the pursuit of efficiency and the pursuit of fairness.

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, this is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one of the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics.

A foundational new collection examining the mechanics of privacy in the digital age.

The falling costs of collecting, storing, and processing data have allowed firms and governments to improve their products and services, but have also created databases with detailed individual-level data that raise privacy concerns. This volume summarizes the research on the economics of privacy and identifies open questions on the value of privacy, the roles of property rights and markets for privacy and data, the relationship between privacy and inequality, and the political economy of privacy regulation.

Several themes emerge across the chapters. One is that it may not be possible to solve privacy concerns by creating a market for the right to privacy, even if property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low. Another is that it is difficult to measure and value the benefits of privacy, particularly when individuals have an intrinsic preference for privacy. Most previous attempts at valuation have focused only on quantifiable economic outcomes, such as innovation. Finally, defining privacy through an economic lens is challenging. The broader academic and legal literature includes many distinct definitions of privacy, and different definitions may be appropriate in different contexts. The chapters explore a variety of frameworks for examining these questions and provide a range of new perspectives on the role of economics research in understanding the benefits and costs of privacy and of data flows. As the digital economy continues to expand the scope of economic theory and research, The Economics of Privacy provides the most comprehensive survey to date of this field and its next steps.

Religion has not been a popular target for economic analysis. Yet the tools of economics can offer deep insights into how religious groups compete, deliver social services, and reach out to potential converts—how, in daily life, religions nurture and deploy market power. Sriya Iyer puts these tools to use in an expansive, creative study of India, one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world.

Iyer explores how growth, inequality, education, technology, and social trends both affect and are affected by religious groups. Her exceptionally rich data—drawn from ten years of research, including a survey of almost 600 religious organizations in seven states—reveal the many ways religions interact with social welfare and political conflict. After India’s economy was liberalized in 1991, she shows, religious organizations substantially increased their provision of services, compensating for the retreat of the state. Iyer’s data also indicate that religious violence is more common where economic growth is higher, apparently because growth increases inequality, which sectarian politicians might exploit to encourage hostility toward other religions. As inequality leads to social polarization, religious doctrines become more extreme. But there are hopeful patterns in Iyer’s data, too. Religious organizations, on balance, play a positive role in India’s socioeconomic development, and women’s participation in religious life is on the rise.

The Economics of Religion in India has much to teach us about India and other pluralistic societies the world over, and about the power of economics to illuminate some of societies’ deepest beliefs and dynamics.

This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. Such prizes and the competitions they crown are almost as old as the arts themselves, but their number and power--and their consequences for society and culture at large--have expanded to an unprecedented degree in our day. In a wide-ranging overview of this phenomenon, James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige.

Observing that cultural prizes in their modern form originate at the turn of the twentieth century with the institutional convergence of art and competitive spectator sports, English argues that they have in recent decades undergone an important shift--a more genuine and far-reaching globalization than what has occurred in the economy of material goods. Focusing on the cultural prize in its contemporary form, his book addresses itself broadly to the economic dimensions of culture, to the rules or logic of exchange in the market for what has come to be called "cultural capital." In the wild proliferation of prizes, English finds a key to transformations in the cultural field as a whole. And in the specific workings of prizes, their elaborate mechanics of nomination and election, presentation and acceptance, sponsorship, publicity, and scandal, he uncovers evidence of the new arrangements and relationships that have refigured that field.

In this hard-hitting history of "the gospel of education," W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson reveal the allure, and the fallacy, of the longstanding American faith that more schooling for more people is the remedy for all our social and economic problems--and that the central purpose of education is workplace preparation.

But do increasing levels of education accurately represent the demands of today's jobs? Grubb and Lazerson argue that the abilities developed in schools and universities and the competencies required in work are often mismatched--since many Americans are under-educated for serious work while at least a third are over-educated for the jobs they hold. The ongoing race for personal advancement and the focus on worker preparation have squeezed out civic education and learning for its own sake. Paradoxically, the focus on schooling as a mechanism of equity has reinforced social inequality. The challenge now, the authors show, is to create environments for learning that incorporate both economic and civic goals, and to prevent the further descent of education into a preoccupation with narrow work skills and empty credentials.

"Globalization" is here. Signified by an increasingly close economic interconnection that has led to profound political and social change around the world, the process seems irreversible. In this book, however, Harold James provides a sobering historical perspective, exploring the circumstances in which the globally integrated world of an earlier era broke down under the pressure of unexpected events.

James examines one of the great historical nightmares of the twentieth century: the collapse of globalism in the Great Depression. Analyzing this collapse in terms of three main components of global economics--capital flows, trade, and international migration--James argues that it was not simply a consequence of the strains of World War I but resulted from the interplay of resentments against all these elements of mobility, as well as from the policies and institutions designed to assuage the threats of globalism. Could it happen again? There are significant parallels today: highly integrated systems are inherently vulnerable to collapse, and world financial markets are vulnerable and unstable. While James does not foresee another Great Depression, his book provides a cautionary tale in which institutions meant to save the world from the consequences of globalization--think WTO and IMF, in our own time--ended by destroying both prosperity and peace.

Malaysia interests development practitioners for many reasons, not least because of its remarkably rich natural environment. Environment and Development in a Resource-Rich Economy provides an invaluable analysis of major natural resource and environmental policy issues in the country during the 1970s and 1980s--a period of profound socioeconomic changes, rapid depletion of natural resources, and the emergence of serious air and water pollution problems.

What is path-breaking about this book is its emphasis on economics as a source of concepts and methods for analyzing natural resource and environmental issues and policy responses. The authors' access to unpublished data and key decision makers makes this account of extensive, field-based research an essential reference for policy makers and researchers concerned about environmental and natural resource management--both in Malaysia and throughout the globe. The book should be of particular interest for students who hope to understand more thoroughly the economic underpinnings of natural resource and environmental management policy.

For those who undergo it, infertility treatment is costly, time-consuming, invasive, and emotionally and physically arduous, yet technology remains the focus of most public discussion of the topic. Drawing on concepts from medical ethics, feminist theory, and Roman Catholic social teaching, Maura A. Ryan analyzes the economic, ethical, theological, and political dimensions of assisted reproduction.

Taking seriously the experience of infertility as a crisis of the self, the spirit, and the body, Ryan argues for the place of reproductive technologies within a temperate, affordable, sustainable, and just health care system. She contends that only by ceasing to treat assisted reproduction as a consumer product can meaningful questions about medical appropriateness and social responsibility be raised. She places infertility treatments within broader commitments to the common good, thereby understanding reproductive rights as an inherently social, rather than individual, issue. Arguing for some limits on access to reproductive technology, Ryan considers ways to assess the importance of assisted reproduction against other social and medical prerogatives and where to draw the line in promoting fertility. Finally, Ryan articulates the need for a compassionate spirituality within faith communities that will nurture those who are infertile.

A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity.

American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success?

According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century.

Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.

The next two decades will mark a new phase in the demographic transition of the United States as baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. Drawing on evidence from the United States and other nations, Explorations in the Economics of Aging yields important new findings on how economic decisions by households and policy choices by governments will influence the effects of this demographic shift. It explores topics such as the implications of differential mortality rates by income on Social Security, the link between cognition and economic outcomes, and scale variations in self-reported work disability. This volume will be an important reference for economists and policymakers alike.

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.

This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project.

Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today’s financial “instruments” is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world’s have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces—and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.