Copyright (c) 2008 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen Recent documents in Eric Bennett Rasmusen en-us Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:11:51 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/68 http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/68 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:10:27 PST It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This paper makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying asset becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This paper uses two new definitions of "riskier" to show that the value of an option strictly increases (a) if the underlying asset becomes "pointwise riskier," and (b) only if the underlying asset becomes "extremum riskier." Eric Bennett Rasmusen Finance http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/67 http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/67 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:07:54 PST Everyone realizes the importance of social norms as guides to behavior and substitutes for law, but coming up with a paradigm for analyzing norms has been surprisingly difficult, as has systematic empirical study. In this chapter of the Handbook of Law and Economics, edited by A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavell and forthcoming in 2006, we survey the topic. Eric Bennett Rasmusen Law and Economics http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/66 http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/66 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:05:13 PST This is the introduction and contents list for the forthcoming book, Law and Game Theory, in the series Economic Approaches to Law edited by Richard A. Posner and Francesco Parisi, Edward Elgar Publishing. Eric Bennett Rasmusen Law and Economics game theory http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/65 http://works.bepress.com/rasmusen/65 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:02:47 PST Because of the risk of political interference, in countries with managed courts jurists who share ruling-party preferences disproportionately self-select into judicial careers. During political turmoil, such jurists will find judicial careers less attractive. Orthodox potential jurists will disproportionately shun the courts, and orthodox incumbent judges will disproportionately resign. Unorthodox potential jurists, on the other hand, might find the judiciary more attractive. Combining data on a random sample of 1,605 Japanese lawyers and all 2,502 judges hired between 1971 and 2001, we locate evidence consistent with these hypotheses: after the political crisis of 1993, the recruitment of young lawyers from elite universities lagged, while the number of early resignations increased. Eric Bennett Rasmusen Law and Economics Japan