Andrew Granato
@agranato42
Assistant Professor at UT Austin School of Law; legal economist. "We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price - so that we may survive." Site:
More on the LA Dodgers PE/private credit/life insurance criminal probe. This is the exact sort of issue that @pranjal-drall.bsky.social and I flag: use of an insurer as a privileged issuance vehicle for private credit to other firms of the owner, potentially at policyholder/taxpayer expense.
Thanks Odd Lots and @tracyalloway.bsky.social for highlighting our research on Private Credit's State Backstop!
New w/ @pranjal-drall.bsky.social: Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers. It's about how insurance insolvency, tax, and financial-regulation law have subsidized PE's takeover of life insurance and become the submerged law of private credit.
Really excited to see that this paper has gone public. One of the most exciting things a paper can do is show you that all sorts of scattered phenomena are actually part of a whole. Link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
This is another context in which valuation standards differ depending on underlying substantive law; in other words, the same house would be worth a different amount of money if the legal question was different. I explore this issue in Conflicting Values in Judicial Valuations:
In Pung vs. Isabella Cty today, the Supreme Court held that the proper valuation method for determining "just compensation" in a foreclosure of property to make up tax debt does not have to be its "fair market value" (what a "willing buyer" and "willing seller" would achieve).
Final version is live on the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies website! Why defendant-side expert witnesses get paid systematically more in class actions (and, arguably, all contingency fee litigation) than their plaintiff-side counterparts.
Conflicting Values in Judicial Valuations is now forthcoming at the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies! Thanks to the reviewers, discussants, and conference participants who have helped the paper.
Once more: the Supreme Court, strong-form law & economics, and Marxist legal theory agree that the most important function of the Court is to protect capital. What they disagree about is whether that is normatively good.
Very proud and happy to see that this is up and that Texas Law students can take my seminar on Unorthodox Business Associations this fall. Always looking for more examples!
An observation re-inspired by seeing this new paper: in the agentic AI era, the true foe of empirical legal studies is the judiciary. Empirical studies with regulatory data can pull in millions of observations in weeks, days (hours?). But if you do work on litigation, good luck.
Among other things, this paper is a showcase of how tools entirely internal to economics can demonstrate findings that are entirely contrary to oversimplistic "econ 101" narratives. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...
Tax Notes has discovered that Jeffrey Epstein created several Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts after he was indicted in 2006. My read: the premiums contributed suggest that Epstein was probably not using them for the income tax exemption, but quite possibly for asset protection.
Having a chuckle that this article has the high ratio of downloads to abstract views of any article I've ever seen. What the people want! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
When I worked at the Chicago Fed, we became interested in a unique quirk of insurance accounting: states can issue insurers "permitted practice" accounting exceptions. They're relatively uncommon but acan occasionally be quite significant. Our writeup is out: link.springer.com/epdf/10.1057...
Under the new FAFSA form, when applying for financial aid you only have to report a 529 account *for that student*, meaning that if you have n children, you only have to report 1/n of your total 529 assets. Pure arbitrage through faulty reporting rules. thecollegefinanciallady.com/2026/01/13/t...
"BFP" means Black Family Partners, L.P., per an earlier document on a family meeting the Black family had with Epstein on estate planning strategies:
Disgraced former Apollo CEO Leon Black reportedly consulted with Jeffrey Epstein on use of GRATs to dodge estate & gift tax. I searched the Epstein files and found a doc that appears to show that in 2015, Black held over 70% of his family office (value in the billions) in GRATs.
Interesting to me: they find that firms change behavior exclusively as a result of changes in composition at the appellate level, not at the trial court level (here, the federal district courts and the Tax Court; the authors don't use Court of Federal Claims data).
Liked this paper, "Judge Ideology and Corporate Tax Planning," a lot. When the federal Circuit Court of a firm's headquarters becomes more liberal, firms reduce the aggressiveness of their tax planning (proxied by effective tax rate and certain higher-risk maneuvers). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
I learned a lot from this paper, Valuing Litigation Assets by Robert Weber. Burford Capital, the largest publicly traded litigation finance company, was reporting the fair value of their litigation claims on their quarterly reports using expected value methods that didn't use time value of money!
I'm quoted in the latest @laurenloricchio.bsky.social + @chandrawallace.bsky.social @taxnotes.com investigation of the "offshore" life insurance industry, which found a Russian oligarch with a $430 million policy. Article here: www.taxnotes.com/tax-notes-to...
I am on the legal academic job market! My job talk paper is on how courts in tax, corporate, and bankruptcy law spheres value business interests systematically differently, such that the same asset is "worth" different amounts of money depending on the substantive underlying law.
We argue that expert asymmetry provides another potential justification for "inquisitorial" over "adversarial" litigation procedures, specifically increased judicial deployment of Federal Rule of Evidence 706, which permits judicially appointed experts.
Adjusting for inflation, the plaintiff-side economic experts (performing mostly 'event studies') are paid an average of $840 an hour in securities litigation, while the defense-side economic experts are paid an average of $1,150 an hour.
We test our complete model in securities litigation. Experts (at the individual and consulting firm level) polarize into almost entirely plaintiff-side vs. defense-side experts who are repeat players. Roughly 20 people appears in outright majorities of cases in this field.
In the simple case, this is a pure agency issue, which we model. But civil procedure law also provides for an litigation expense reimbursement out of class winnings if the plaintiff wins, meaning that which party has incentive to spend more on experts is not initially clear!
In class actions, as well as in many individual suits, plaintiffs' attorneys are compensated on contingency (they get a % of winnings if they win/settle, but get $0 if they lose), but they have to pay for litigation expenses (including experts) upfront.