The development of artificial intelligence has created new opportunities and challenges in industries. The competition between robots and humans has elicited extensive attention among legal researchers. In this exploratory study, we addressed issues regarding the introduction of robots to the practice of legal service through a semistructured interviews with lawyers, judges, artificial intelligence experts, and potential clients. An extended robot lawyer technology acceptance model with five facets and 11 elements is proposed in this study. This model highlights two dimensions: ‘legal use’ and ‘perception of trust.’ In summary, this study provides new specific implications and exhibits three characteristics, namely, derivative, macroscopic, and instructive, in the legal services with artificial intelligence. In addition, artificial intelligence robot lawyers are being developed with some of the abilities necessary to substitute for human beings. Nevertheless, working with human lawyers is imperative to produce benefits from this type of reciprocity.

We document significant differences in the financing structures of small firms with managers of diverse cultural backgrounds. To isolate the effect of culture, we exploit cultural heterogeneity within a geographical area with shared regulations, institutions, and macroeconomic cycles. Our findings suggest significant cultural differences in the preference toward debt funding and in the use of formal and informal sources of financing (bank loans and trade credit). Our results are robust to alternative explanations based on potential differences in credit constraints and in the distribution of cultural origins across industries, trading partners, and headquarters locations.

There is strong interest in both developing and developed countries toward expanding health insurance coverage. How should the benefits, and costs, of expanded coverage be measured? While the value of reducing the financial risks that result from insurance coverage have long been recognized, there has been less attention in how best to measure such benefits. In this paper, we first provide a framework for assessing the financial value from health insurance. We focus on three distinct potential benefits: Pooling the risk of unexpected medical expenditures between healthy and sick households, redistributing resources from high- to low-income recipients and smoothing consumption over time. We then use this theoretical framework and an illustrative example to provide practical guidelines for benefit-cost analysis in capturing the full benefits (and costs) of expanding health insurance coverage. We conclude by considering other potential financial effects of broad insurance coverage, such as the ability to consolidate purchases and thus lower input prices.