We investigate whether the February 2012 amendments to the Check Law in Turkey that replaced imprisonment with monetary and administrative fines for writing bad checks were a driver of the surge in the frequency of bad checks since late 2011. As the planned amendments were announced well in advance, check issuance behavior was potentially altered before the amendments officially took effect. To capture this, we use the cumulative volume of related keyword searches on the internet as a proxy for the legal change. We find that unlike the case during the global financial crisis, the surge in bad checks around 2012 cannot be explained by the changes in the economic environment unless the February 2012 legal change is also controlled for. We also show that the surge in the incidence of bad checks was not accompanied by an increase in their average value. Finally, we provide evidence that economic agents adapt fairly rapidly to the legal change by adjusting their screening and monitoring capacities, which helps to reverse the surge in bad checks within a year. Overall, our findings suggest that sanctions need not be harsh to deter wrongful behavior as long as appropriate infrastructures that will enable efficient behavioral adjustments are in place.
{"title":"Fines versus Prison for the Issuance of Bad Checks: Evidence from a Policy Shift in Turkey","authors":"Ozan Ekşi, M. Gurdal, C. Orman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2828746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2828746","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate whether the February 2012 amendments to the Check Law in Turkey that replaced imprisonment with monetary and administrative fines for writing bad checks were a driver of the surge in the frequency of bad checks since late 2011. As the planned amendments were announced well in advance, check issuance behavior was potentially altered before the amendments officially took effect. To capture this, we use the cumulative volume of related keyword searches on the internet as a proxy for the legal change. We find that unlike the case during the global financial crisis, the surge in bad checks around 2012 cannot be explained by the changes in the economic environment unless the February 2012 legal change is also controlled for. We also show that the surge in the incidence of bad checks was not accompanied by an increase in their average value. Finally, we provide evidence that economic agents adapt fairly rapidly to the legal change by adjusting their screening and monitoring capacities, which helps to reverse the surge in bad checks within a year. Overall, our findings suggest that sanctions need not be harsh to deter wrongful behavior as long as appropriate infrastructures that will enable efficient behavioral adjustments are in place.","PeriodicalId":292153,"journal":{"name":"CJRN: White-Collar","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117020627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The federal government has used criminal fines to punish corporations for as long as it has been punishing corporations. Yet to this day, with more than a century in which to get the punishment right, corporate-criminal fines fail to satisfy virtually any standard justification that underlies criminal punishment. Attempts to address the failure of corporate-criminal fines founder on two shoals. First, there is a deep and abiding ambiguity about what it means to designate corporate fines as a failed punishment. Second, there is a tendency to see the failure of punishment as a problem for criminal law to solve, and in doing so to treat corporate law as a fixed, immutable feature of the legal background. This particularly is a profound mistake: the failure of corporate-criminal fines is as much a corporate-law problem as it is a criminal-law problem.Corporate punishment stands at the vanguard of the conceptual and regulatory interplay between corporate and criminal law. At the heart of this conflict is an interaction between drastically different regulatory functions that operate on the basis of conflicting conceptions of the corporation: corporations as persons for criminal law, and corporations as systems for corporate law. While pluralism about the nature of corporation works well when cabined to specific legal domains, corporate-criminal punishment forces these domains, and their competing conception of the corporation, to reconcile or give way. This Article explores the intimate connections between corporate law and criminal punishment — specifically, how corporate law creates the conditions for, makes necessary, and yet at the same time undermines criminal law’s efforts to punish corporations. Appreciating these interconnections requires understanding not just the conceptual frames implicit to each area of law, but also the historical contingency of associating certain conceptions of the corporation with particular legal domains. To be sure, this project is reform-minded: I consider what it would mean to improve criminal fines through corporate law reforms designed to redistribute the harms attendant to criminal fines in a manner that better aligns the punishment with standard penological aims. That said, the ambition first and foremost is to reveal a blind spot in current discussions of corporate-criminal punishment by drawing attention to the conceptual intricacies that attend a practice — corporate-criminal punishment — that stitches together diametrically opposed conceptions of the corporation.
{"title":"The Ability and Responsibility of Corporate Law to Improve Criminal Punishment","authors":"W. R. Thomas","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2729590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2729590","url":null,"abstract":"The federal government has used criminal fines to punish corporations for as long as it has been punishing corporations. Yet to this day, with more than a century in which to get the punishment right, corporate-criminal fines fail to satisfy virtually any standard justification that underlies criminal punishment. Attempts to address the failure of corporate-criminal fines founder on two shoals. First, there is a deep and abiding ambiguity about what it means to designate corporate fines as a failed punishment. Second, there is a tendency to see the failure of punishment as a problem for criminal law to solve, and in doing so to treat corporate law as a fixed, immutable feature of the legal background. This particularly is a profound mistake: the failure of corporate-criminal fines is as much a corporate-law problem as it is a criminal-law problem.Corporate punishment stands at the vanguard of the conceptual and regulatory interplay between corporate and criminal law. At the heart of this conflict is an interaction between drastically different regulatory functions that operate on the basis of conflicting conceptions of the corporation: corporations as persons for criminal law, and corporations as systems for corporate law. While pluralism about the nature of corporation works well when cabined to specific legal domains, corporate-criminal punishment forces these domains, and their competing conception of the corporation, to reconcile or give way. This Article explores the intimate connections between corporate law and criminal punishment — specifically, how corporate law creates the conditions for, makes necessary, and yet at the same time undermines criminal law’s efforts to punish corporations. Appreciating these interconnections requires understanding not just the conceptual frames implicit to each area of law, but also the historical contingency of associating certain conceptions of the corporation with particular legal domains. To be sure, this project is reform-minded: I consider what it would mean to improve criminal fines through corporate law reforms designed to redistribute the harms attendant to criminal fines in a manner that better aligns the punishment with standard penological aims. That said, the ambition first and foremost is to reveal a blind spot in current discussions of corporate-criminal punishment by drawing attention to the conceptual intricacies that attend a practice — corporate-criminal punishment — that stitches together diametrically opposed conceptions of the corporation.","PeriodicalId":292153,"journal":{"name":"CJRN: White-Collar","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123486723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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