Written contracts are a fundamental framework for commercial and cooperative transactions and relationships. Limited research has been published on the application of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to contracts. In this paper we report the classification of components of contract texts using machine learning and hand-coded methods. Authors studying a range of domains hav...

We study how equity and debt contracts commit investors to discipline managers. Our model shows that the optimal allocation of debt, equity, and control rights depends on which disciplinary action is more efficient. When the efficient action is managerial replacement, then control rights should be allocated to equity holders, and capital structure should consist of equity and long-term debt. Wh...

Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, expressiveness contracts double-edged sword: while it enables programmability, also introduces security vulnerabilities, i.e., exploitable discrepancies between expected actual behaviors contract code. To address thes...

Do legal rules matter for economic outcomes? Can changing the details of specific laws affect overall institutions in a way that will have a significant short-term impact? Is it particularly effective to change securities law and regulation? For all three questions, a common answer in both economics and law is “no.” The intellectual underpinning for this position is influential work by Ronald C...

Blockchains are modern distributed systems that provide decentralized financial capabilities with trustable guarantees. Smart contracts programs written in specialized programming languages running on a blockchain and govern how tokens cryptocurrency sent received. can invoke other during the execution of transactions initiated by external users. Once deployed, smart cannot be modified their pi...