Link: https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/solving-housing-puzzle

Abstract: This Comment analyzes the entrance of institutional investors into the single-family rental market after the Great Recession of 2008. The collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession fundamentally changed the ownership structure of U.S. single-family homes in two distinct ways. First, the number of families renting single-family homes soared. And second, institutional investors entered the single-family home market, buying many homes and converting them into rental properties. This postrecession reality has introduced a housing puzzle: the pricing trends of single-family rentals in the decade after the Great Recession suggest that institutional investors have captured monopolistic power over the single-family rental market despite owning a relatively small market share. Thus, this Comment evaluates the housing puzzle through the lens of antitrust law.

While a potential antitrust case appears to suffer from the critical weaknesses of low entry barriers and market shares, analyzing institutional entrance into the single-family rental market under antitrust merger doctrine reveals that the case is stronger than it may initially seem. Although it is hard to envision a successful antitrust lawsuit against institutional investors today, there are reasons to believe these weaknesses will disappear if these market trends continue tomorrow. Furthermore, scrutinizing the entrance under alternative merger theories, such as the unilateral or coordinated effects theories, illustrates that a Clayton Act case would be more impactful than originally thought.

After evaluating the antitrust case, this Comment considers how the housing market can instruct antitrust doctrine’s further evolution, since commentators across academia, the media, and politics all criticize institutional entrance. By highlighting how unique market facts in housing obfuscate market power, this Comment suggests expanding the merger analysis to include not just levels and changes in concentration, but also orders of magnitude.

https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/us-v-kordel-parallel-proceedings-and-value-statistical-freedom

 Quick Summary

Suppose that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges a defendant with a financial violation. Suppose further that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is also currently investigating the matter for potential white-collar criminal prosecution. Often, in scenarios such as this one, without direct evidence of a future criminal proceeding, a district court judge will deny a defendant’s motion to stay the civil proceeding until after the disposition of a potential criminal proceeding surrounding the same facts. Forced to continue the civil proceeding, the defendant must respond to various informational requests, including interrogatories and subpoenas. However, if the defendant refuses to comply with the requests, a judge or jury may draw an adverse inference against them. Defendants who face potential parallel civil and criminal proceedings (hereafter “parallel proceedings”) tied to the same actions often face a difficult question: “Should I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination?” However, if they choose not to invoke their Fifth Amendment privilege, they will be barred from doing so should the criminal action get filed. The defendant is forced into a double-bind: they must choose between potentially incriminating themself and potentially losing or raising the costs of their civil case. Although some judges, acknowledging the impossibility of this double-bind, will not enforce an adverse inference finding, many will.

   This Essay does not take a position on the ethics or constitutionality of parallel proceedings. Instead, it proposes using the dilemma defendants face in parallel proceedings as a way to measure the Value of Statistical Freedom (VSF). The VSF (sometimes called the Value of Liberty) can be thought of as an individual’s willingness to pay to not be in prison.

See here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jle/current

https://www.bleedinggreennation.com/2023/4/4/23670498/2023-nfl-mock-draft-indianapolis-colts-quarterback-anthony-richardson-florida-gators-qb

My article with Eric Helland, titled Legal Outcomes and Home Court Advantage: Evidence from the SEC’s Shift to Administrative Courts, will be published in the Journal of Law and Economics in November of 2023.

I previously presented this paper at the Conference of Empirical Legal Studies in March of 2022 at the (online version of) University of Toronto.

Abstract: Administrative Law Judges’ (ALJs’) relative lack of formal independence has engendered worries that ALJs give agencies a “home-court’’ advantage. We examine the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which allowed the SEC to move cases into its administrative court. The problem Dodd-Frank as a policy experiment is that the SEC retains the discretion to bring cases in federal court, so it is impossible to identify which cases the policy treats. We propose a difference-in-difference design, using natural language processing (NLP) methods to create our control and treatment groups. We construct the propensity scores using random forest methods. After binning cases into likely and not likely affected by the Dodd-Frank expansion of administrative courts, the difference-in-differences estimation indicates the expansion made defendants 30 percentage points more likely to settle and 36 percentage points more likely to receive a non-monetary penalty. We also find a 24-percentage point reduction in the likelihood of a monetary penalty.