Limited Liability for Vaccine Makers
Armchairs: What are the pros and cons of limiting liability for the maker of a new vaccine? It seems to me that a disadvantage of limited liability is the moral hazard that the maker will do a less responsible job of trying to prevent bad side effects. One advantage that has been put forth is that limiting liability gets us a vaccine sooner as firms are reluctant to make a new drug in the face of possible law suits for bad side effects. Is there alternate set of rules not involving limited liability that could be adopted to obtain a safe drug in a timely fashion? All the best, Asa Janney -- Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. -- Jerry Garcia
fat tax
Jonathan Rauch has a very clever piece on the recent idea to tax fat foods. Only Rauch has a much better idea. Now why didn't I think of that? Alex http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/12/rauch.htm -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366
Re: Limited Liability for Vaccine Makers
In a message dated 11/20/02 11:50:17 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Armchairs: What are the pros and cons of limiting liability for the maker of a new vaccine? It seems to me that a disadvantage of limited liability is the moral hazard that the maker will do a less responsible job of trying to prevent bad side effects. One advantage that has been put forth is that limiting liability gets us a vaccine sooner as firms are reluctant to make a new drug in the face of possible law suits for bad side effects. Is there alternate set of rules not involving limited liability that could be adopted to obtain a safe drug in a timely fashion? All the best, Asa Janney For some time now I've wondered about limited liability. A buddy of mine did his dissertation on limited liability in the British context, and as I recall (at least tentatively) concluded that the reduction in investment from having no limited liability would have been small, and that Parliament granted it in its general form for another or other reasons. (I just wrote to him to see what he ended up concluding in the final draft). Limited liability has long struck me as something rather odd, as it unilaterally abrogates the rights of all contingent creditors of the enterprise (potential tort victims). I'm quite interested to hear how people on the list view this phenomenon. David Levenstam
