International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

There is a consensus that the proportion of suicides committed with a firearm is the best proxy for gun ownership prevalence. Cerqueira et al. (2018) exploit socioeconomic characteristics of suicide victims in order to develop more refined prevalence indicators. They rest on location fixed effects of the victim's place of residence from a discrete-choice model for the likelihood of committing suicide with gun. We empirically assess this new indicator using gun ownership data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and suicide registers of the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) from 1995 to 2004. We show that the panel-based proxy variables correlate more with the percentage of households with firearms than the conventional proxy based on the proportion of suicides committed with a firearm does. We further estimate gun prevalence across Mexican states. This is a relevant application because there is no representative household survey in Mexico with information about gun ownership at the state level.

While there is widespread evidence that sentences for similar cases tend to differ across courts, the production of sentencing disparities by prosecutors versus judges has received very limited attention to date. In this paper, we focus on this issue using traffic offenses data from neighboring courts in South-East France. First, we measure disparities for observably similar cases both at the extensive margin (type of sentences) and intensive margin (quantum) and find large differences in sentencing across courts. Second, we decompose those disparities between the influence of prosecutors through their procedural choices (simplified versus classical criminal procedures) and that of judges who always have the final word on sentences. While there is heterogeneity in the role of prosecutors between courts, we find that most sentencing disparities cannot be explained by the sole decisions of prosecutors.

In this paper, we argue that the availability of colleges incentivizes college enrollment and, by increasing the opportunity cost of incarceration, it has the potential to reduce crime. We provide empirical evidence from college expansions in the US over the years 1974–2019 and implement a triple-difference identification strategy to compare the arrest rates of different age groups over time in counties that differ by their college expansions. The reduced-form results suggest significant reductions in arrest rates. The effects hold across main categories of crime and over a variety of specifications and a wide array of robustness checks. We utilize an event-study analysis and a series of placebo tests to rule out the problems of pre-trend and endogenous migration. We discuss the policy implications and potential social savings of college opening through reductions in crime.

Federal and state law enforcement interceptions of communications, as authorized by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and analogous state laws, are contingent on obtaining a court order. We investigate how wiretap orders have been utilized in narcotics cases across the federal and state court systems. We characterize a sorting mechanism that is consistent with our data and empirical findings, whereby federal wiretap orders trade off prosecution outcomes and crime deterrence more quickly than state wiretap orders. We also find that the intensity of surveillance in most states and years is at the lower end of the enforcement-deterrence trade-off, reflecting the high cost of running wiretap operations.

With surges in U.S. corporate political spending following the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United v. FEC, this paper studies the transparency of corporate political spending. We argue that shareholder engagements aimed at improving such transparency are more successful than previously documented in the literature. Some “voluntary” disclosures by firms are the result of settled engagements. Firms with political action committees, weaker political transparency, more politically connected directors, and higher sensitivity to political uncertainty are more likely to be targeted by activist shareholders. Institutional investors, especially socially responsible investment funds, are more likely to succeed after initiating engagements. Using hand-collected public announcements of engagement outcomes, we find that the stock market reacts positively (negatively) to successful (unsuccessful) engagements in politically active firms. Moreover, increased transparency facilitates the investors’ assessment of firms’ exposure to external political risks, the monitoring of firms’ political expenditure, and tacit coordination among industry peers. Collectively, our results suggest that investors value corporate political transparency, especially in the case of politically active firms.

We investigate how the lockdown enforcement by French authorities is associated with the resolution of corporate insolvency. In this sense, we make a distinction between four legal procedures, namely the amicable liquidation (out-of-court exit), the judicial liquidation (court-driven exit), the restructuring procedure available to non-defaulted firms, and the restructuring procedure available to defaulted firms. Using a sample of 3488 non-listed and non-financial French firms, our estimates yield three major findings. First, the likelihood of judicial liquidation increased after the lifting of the quarantines compared to the pre-pandemic period. Second, the non-defaulted firms had a higher likelihood to reorganize in court during the second lockdown. Third, the lifting of the first lockdown led to a decrease in the probability of restructuring the assets of defaulted firms. Although the main objective of the lockdown was to limit spread of the virus, its enforcement has not encouraged the use of the out-of-court exit path.

A 2003 police organization reform in South Korea led to the consolidation of many local police boxes into fewer but larger patrol stations. The expectation was that such consolidation would allow police to utilize its limited resources in a more flexible and efficient way. In this study, we investigate the impact of this reform on crime by exploiting the variation in the extent of police box consolidation across South Korea. Our estimation results indicate that the areas more strongly affected by the consolidation have experienced a notable increase in crime, especially sexual assault and assault. Moreover, we find evidence that the police box consolidation has had a disproportionately higher impact on crime in rural areas, where the distribution of police boxes was sparser than in urban areas. These findings suggest that varying allocations of police resources can have an important impact on crime, even without a significant change in the overall level of police resources.

We model a market for professional services such as those offered by lawyers, auditors or conveyancers. Initially the market is served by a single profession with a self-regulatory organization that sets the quality standard for all the members of the profession. We then introduce a second competing profession (e.g. solicitors vs. licensed conveyancers in England) and compare the market outcomes. It is demonstrated that with two professions the prices of the services fall and so does the quality offered by an average supplier. On the other hand, the total supply of quality might actually rise. When the market is served by two professional groups, then the quality of services offered by the higher-tier profession and the total supply of quality are increasing in the size and in the quality of the lower-tier profession.

We present a model of the interaction between firms agreeing on a degree of collusion and a competition authority that simultaneously determines the allocation of resources to enforcement of anti-trust legislation. An increase in demand is associated with tougher enforcement and a lower degree of collusion. A stronger competitive pressure first decreases the degree of collusion and increases the level of enforcement, then increases both the degree of collusion and the level of enforcement, and eventually increases the degree of collusion and decreases the level of enforcement. Simulation results indicate that a move from the EU penalty regime to the tougher US standard with treble damages would mainly impact on the enforcement intensity and to a much lesser extent affect the degree of collusion.