Chris Sanchirico is Professor of Law, Business, and Public Policy. His primary appointment is at Penn Law School, and he also holds a secondary appointment in Wharton's Business and Public Policy Department. Sanchirico is also Codirector of Penn's Center for Tax Law & Policy. Sanchirico’s work spans several fields of legal scholarship, chiefly tax policy, distributive justice, evidentiary procedure, and social norms.
Tax Law and Policy
A Critical Look at the Economic Argument for Taxing Only Labor Income, University of Pennsylvania, Institute for Law and Economics Research Paper Series 09-08 (2009)
According to accepted wisdom, "the tax substitution argument" fairly establishes that it is best to...
Progressivity and Potential Income: Measuring the Effect of Changing Work Patterns on Income Tax Progressivity, Columbia Law Review (2008)
The income tax taxes the proceeds from market work, but not the “proceeds” from time...
The Tax Advantage to Paying Private Equity Fund Managers with Profit Shares: What is it? Why is it, University of Chicago Law Review (2008)
Private equity is very much in the public eye. The prototypical private equity fund purchases,...
Inequality and Uncertainty: Theory and Legal Applications (with Matthew D. Adler), U. Penn. L. Rev. (2007)
"Welfarism" is the principle that social policy should be based solely on individual well-being with...
Deconstructing the New Efficiency Rationale, Cornell L. Rev. (2001)
One of the most important developments in law and economics over the last decade has...
Evidentiary Procedure
A Primary Activity Approach to Proof Burdens, Journal of Legal Studies (2008)
The question of which party should bear the burden of proof on a given factual...
Evidence Arbitrage: The Fabrication of Evidence and the Verifiability of Contract Performance (with George G. Triantis), Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (2008)
Contract theory identifies verifiability as a critical determinant of the incompleteness of contracts. Although verifiability...
Detection Avoidance, NYU L. Rev. (2006)
In practice, the problem of law enforcement is half a matter of what the government...
Harnessing Adversarial Process: Optimal Strategic Complementarities in Litigation, Scholarship at Penn Law (2006)
This paper studies the evidence production game in adversarial litigation, wherein litigating parties choose how...
General and Specific Legal Rules (with Paul G. Mahoney), Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (2005)
Legal rules may be general (that is, applicable to a broad range of situations) or...
Social Norms
Norms, Repeated Games, and the Role of Law (with Paul Mahoney), Cal. L. Rev. (2003)
In drawing on the theory of repeated games, norms scholars have devoted much attention to...
Competing Norms and Social Evolution: Is the Fittest Norm Efficient? (with Paul Mahoney), U. Penn. L. Rev. (2001)
An influential theme in recent legal scholarship is that law is not as important as...
Game Theory, Probability Theory, Mathematical Economics
Collusion and price rigidity (with Susan Athey, Kyle Bagwell, and Chris Sanchirico), Review of Economic Studies (2004)
We consider an infinitely repeated Bertrand game, in which prices are publicly observed and each...
Almost Everybody Disagrees Almost All the Time: The Genericity of Weakly Merging Nowhere (with Ronald l. Miller), Scholarship at Penn Law (1999)
Suppose we randomly pull two agents from a population and ask them to observe an...
A Probabilistic Model of Learning in Games, Econometrica (1996)
This paper presents a new, probabilistic model of learning in games which investigates the often...