Essays on the law and economics of public institutions

This thesis consists of three chapters on the legal and economic organization of large-scale public institutions. Each chapter uses the tools of applied microeconomics in order to explore how the legal and organizational structure of public institutions affects the behavior of actors inside and outside of the organization as well as the quality of public goods provided. In other words, my thesis asks the question: how well do our public institutions function, or for whom do they function? Chapter 1 focuses on the inner-workings of the United States civil justice system; chapters 2 and 3 focus their attention on the U.S. military. In Chapter 1 I study a procedural reform in the U.S. federal trial courts. Re-cent court reform efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere have focused on speeding up what are perceived to be slow and burdensome civil justice systems.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Petkun, Jonathan Blake.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan Gruber and Heidi Williams.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127036

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127036