Parties who cause harm to others may sometimes turn out to be ‘judgment proof,’ that is, unable to pay fully the amount for which they have been found legally liable.’ This possibility is an important and realistic one. Certainly individuals may readily be imagined to cause personal injury or property damage resulting in judgments that exceed their assets plus any liability insurance coverage; ...

Group liability is often portrayed as the key innovation that led to the explosion of the microcredit movement, which grew with the Grameen Bank in the 1970s and continues on today with hundreds of institutions around the world. Group liability claims to improve repayment rates and lower transaction costs when lending to the poor by providing incentives for peers to screen, monitor and enforce ...

BACKGROUND The aim of the present article is to explore interaction and correlation effects between familial depression liability and selected adverse (separation and traumatic) events in predicting the first onset of a major depressive episode (MDE) in a 10-year prospective longitudinal community survey. METHODS Analyses are based on 1982 subjects (14 to 24 years at baseline) without baselin...

BACKGROUND This paper summarizes a new report presenting the best available research about the impact of the liability environment on maternity care, and policy options for improving this environment. Improved understanding of these matters can help to transcend polarized discourse and guide policy intervention. METHODS We used a best available evidence approach and drew on more recent empiri...

This study examines the impact of malpractice reforms on physician behavior using a new measure of liability risk and a nationally representative, individuallevel data set on physician behavior. We match our liability measure to data on physician behavior from the Physician Practice Costs and Income Survey (PPCIS). Data from the PPCIS bracket a period of substantial state-level legal reform bet...

Numerous principal-agent situations of interest to accounting involve limited liability by the agent. We explore this issue when the outcome is mutually observable (MOC) and when it is not and the contract is based instead on the agent’s report (NCC). We find that when outcome is not observable, the effect of limited lia bility depends on the level of limited liability: when low – no effect; wh...

In his landmark 1961 article, Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts, Judge Calabresi provides a theoretical framework for analyzing tort liability as a risk-spreading device that functions in a manner similar to insurance. In our article, we examine the insurance objective of tort liability from the standpoint of modern tort law. Since Calabresi’s foundational article, there h...

The restructuring of health insurance contracts and health care delivery systems under managed care is the result of competitive attempts to reduce the inefficiencies that developed in medical markets under traditional indemnity insurance. Liability rules that continue to apply norms of customary care threaten to undermine these potential efficiency gains. Liability rules under managed care sho...