Law and Economics of Market Regulation: Theoretical Foundations

Course goals

After this course:

• The students are able to understand the principal economic theories, underlying assumptions and related key legal concepts of market regulation;
• The students are able to apply these economic theories and legal concepts to market and non-market failures in specific scenarios;
• The students are able to critically analyse relevant theoretical and practical problems that arise in the context of market regulation.

 

Content

As a whole, the course provides the basic skills and theoretical background that students will need to participate in Regulation II. The course addresses the basic legal principles, institutions and instruments of market regulation. The main purpose of this course is to acquit students with a critical and informed understanding of different forms of market regulation. After the course, students shall be able to understand the economic rationale behind the formulation of legal rules.
The course first provides the general theoretical background on the basis of the mainstream economic approaches, which outline the concept of market failure. Subsequently, legal rules are introduced as instruments to cope with market failures. The course than zooms in on the legal frameworks and current approaches to public decision-making in several specific regulatory fields (such as telecommunications, finance, environmental protection and regulation of utilities). The students will be exposed to ongoing policy challenges to counter market power, negative externalities, collective goods and information asymmetry, mostly related to EU legislation. The interplay between law and economics will be examined on the basis of actual and current real-life case-studies.
The course adopts a problem-based and cross-disciplinary approach, which will enable law students to understand the economic effects of legal rules and economics students to understand the institutional legal framework of market-based economies. This allows students to get a broad understanding of the possibilities and limitations of current public policies and allow students to get a thorough and multidisciplinary grasp of problems in the domains of regulation.

Teaching methods
The purpose of the course program is to convey legal and economic knowledge in a systematic, integrated way. To do so, the four weekly hours of class contact are split between lectures on the core issues of the program and seminar sessions (or interactive guest lectures delivered by practitioners in a specific field) during which students have to contribute to the learning process by actively taking part in discussions concerning the cases covered, including presentations of materials that are relevant to the cases (such as case law or policy statements).

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Place of this course within the curriculum:
•         Compulsory course in Law and Economics