ABSTRACT
MANY TOPICS WITHIN ECONOMICS relate to law. A large body of work in public economics, for instance, examines the effects of legally-mandated government programs such as disability and unemployment insurance (Katz and Meyer 1990; Gruber 1994; Cutler and Gruber 1996; Autor and Duggan 2003); work on the labor market examines the effects of many types of antidiscrimination laws (Heckman and Payner 1989; Donohue and Heckman 1991; Acemoglu and Angrist 2001; Jolls 2004 a); and recent corporate governance research studies the consequences of corporate and securities law on stock returns and volatility (Gompers, Ishii and Metrick 2003; Ferrell 2003; Greenstone, Oyer and Vissing-Jorgensen 2006). But, while all of these topics relate to law in some way, neither “law and economics” nor “behavioral law and economics” embraces them as genuinely central areas of inquiry. Thus an important threshold question for the present work involves how to characterize the domains of both “law and economics” and “behavioral law and economics.”
