International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

In some legal systems, non-convicted pretrial detainees are to be compensated by the Government for the losses derived from their stay on remand. Several theoretical and empirical studies have analyzed some of the consequences of such compensation. This paper finds a result that said studies did not predict: a legal change that relaxed the requirements for compensation is correlated with a reduction in the amount of compensation awarded. We empirically analyze which factors are correlated with the amount of compensation awarded in these cases by Spanish courts from 1990 until today. Our econometrical analysis finds that (i) this amount has drastically decreased after the Supreme Court, by establishing that every non-convicted pretrial detainee is to be compensated, significantly expanded the set of cases where such compensation is due. Moreover: (ii) the longer the time spent on remand, the lower the daily compensation awarded; (iii) those who work receive higher damages than those who do not work, but there are notable (and apparently unjustifiable) differences by type of work; e.g., police officials get much higher awards than other claimants; (iv) we find no gender nor foreign bias.

Several studies provide evidence that heat is positively associated with criminal activity. However, the empirical literature does not provide conclusive evidence about the effect of high temperature on homicides. I examine 156 estimates from 20 studies on the relationship between temperature and homicide rates. In particular, in this meta-analysis I study publication bias using linear and nonlinear techniques together with Bayesian model averaging to explain the heterogeneity in the estimates. After correcting estimates from the publication bias, I cannot conclude that there is a significant effect of temperature on homicide rates. Moreover, monthly data produce larger estimates. Conversely, studies using data from Asia or the OLS estimation method lead to smaller estimates.

Ban-the-box (BTB) laws are a widely used public policy rooted in employment law related to unnecessarily exclusionary hiring practices. BTB laws are intended to improve the employment opportunities of those with criminal backgrounds by giving them a fair chance during the hiring process. Prior research on the effectiveness of these laws in meeting their objective is limited and inconclusive. In this article, we extend the prior literature in two ways: we expand the years of analysis to a period of rapid expansion of BTB laws and we examine different types of BTB laws depending on the employers affected (e.g., public sector). Results indicate that BTB laws, any type of BTB law or BTB laws covering different types of employers, have no systematic or statistically significant association with employment of low-educated men, both young and old and across racial and ethnic groups. We speculate that the lack of effectiveness of BTB laws stems from the difficulty in enforcing such laws and already high rates of employer willingness to hire those with criminal histories.

If it is disclosed to a citizen which public official handles her case, this creates accountability. If the official abuses her authority, the citizen can report this misconduct to higher authority, which can intervene. But transparency also makes it possible for a citizen to pressure an official to decide in her favor. We model this interaction as a sequential game, and define which behavioral effects are required for either effect to dominate. We test the game experimentally. Within the parameters of our experiment, transparency clearly trumps anonymity. If the abuse of sovereign authority risks going unchecked, the occasional retaliation against dutiful officials is, on balance, the smaller social cost.

Recent literature discusses how “menu laws” allow corporations to opt into one of multiple competing statutory regimes. This paper contributes to this literature by presenting original empirical research on the choice between corporate board models. Today, many countries not only allow modifications of a particular board structure, but they provide separate legal templates, giving firms a choice between a one-tier and a two-tier board model (and sometimes a third hybrid model). However, how companies actually use these rules is largely underexplored. Based on data from 14 European countries that permit a choice between two models, this paper examines the use of this form of “elective corporate governance” at the firm level: what types of firms make use of which model and whether this choice can be associated with specific financial measures such as operating revenue, cash ratio and leverage. The descriptive statistics show that introducing board choice has led to a gradual decline of the two-tier model. Yet, despite this decline, we did not find that the regression results unambiguously speak against the two-tier model, nor did we find that companies that have changed their board model with the introduction of choice performed better than companies that have retained the original model.

In France, the reform of the judicial map, initiated in mid-2007 and completed in 2010, led to a large reduction in the number of courts of first instance, from almost 500 to around 300. This led to an increase of about eight kilometers in the distance litigants should travel to courts in the treated jurisdictions. In this paper, we examine the impact of this reform on conciliation activity. We use a panel data set of courts covering the period 2003–2015 and consider a synthetic difference-in-differences strategy to compare changes in the number of referrals, conciliators, and conciliations between courts affected by the reform and those unaffected. We find that the number of conciliators decreased more significantly in treated courts than in control courts. Evidence is less clear for the number of referrals, showing a slightly higher increase in the courts where distance increased the most. Estimation of a production function shows that the reform had no effect on the number of conciliations once inputs are controlled for.

It has long been argued that efficient policies tend to provide larger legal entitlements to the rich than to the poor. This article shows how efficient legal rules can become even more skewed against the poor over time by sowing the seeds of their own vicious cycles. Repeated application over time of these rules can lead to increasingly adverse outcomes for the poor, which the article calls “policy snowballing”.

Consider a set of polluters choosing between locating in places with rich versus poor people and facing a strict liability rule for harm to earnings. Polluters will disproportionately locate in the poor area, where they face lower damages. That disproportionate share of polluters in the poor area can make it cheaper to harm the poor in the next period, making subsequent polluters locate yet more disproportionately in poor neighborhoods, driving down the poor’s earnings further. And so on.

We identify the conditions for snowballing and explore its dynamics. When compensation for the harm is incomplete, policy snowballing can lead to spiraling income inequality. As a result, government transfers to the poor to compensate for the change in legal regime would be inadequate if calculated in a way that ignores the snowballing. The article raises the intriguing prospect that legal rules could generate state dependence in the legal costs of harm, and that efficient policymaking could be a contributing factor to increasing inequality over time.

Under final offer arbitration (FOA), each party to the dispute submits a proposal to the arbitrator who must choose one of the two submitted proposals in the event an agreement is not reached. A long line of research on FOA has assumed that the submitted proposals to the arbitrator are the final bargaining positions of the parties to the dispute. One consequence of this assumption has been a focus on whether proposals submitted to the arbitrator converge towards one another. However, current practice implies a separation between settlement negotiations and proposals submitted to the arbitrator. We use a simple setting to show that proposal convergence can be consistent with an increase in disputes, a decrease in disputes or no effect on the dispute rate. In order to be fully evaluated, mechanisms which lead to proposal convergence must be embedded in a model in which disputes arise endogenously. Understanding FOA is important because it is a widely used procedure. These uses include labor disputes as well as pricing disputes in the telecommunications industries of the United States and Canada.

A pharmaceutical company that seeks to produce a generic version of a brand drug before patent expiration can trigger a Paragraph IV litigation. However, generic and brand companies may avoid litigation through settlement, which sometimes involves payment to the generic company to delay generic entry. This behavior would be problematic if the settlement option was used to protect patents with low social value. This study explores the relationship between Paragraph IV litigation characteristics and the probability of a Paragraph IV settlement. Examining Paragraph IV settlements from 2003 to 2020, we find that the number of patents being litigated and the years of remaining market exclusivity are the strongest predictors of settlement. Moreover, we find no statistically significant relationship between active ingredient patents and settlement. This information may be helpful to regulators intending to promote the goals of the Hatch-Waxman Act.

The paper investigates all (971) non-executed pending leading cases of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) between 2012 and 2020 through Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Drawing on the extant scholarship, our interest on compliance has centred on state level and case level variables. For the identification of important variables, four databases have been used. Each country party to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) received 232 distinct factors for eight years. Since we aim to make a parameter estimation for a high-dimensional data set, Simulated Annealing (SA) is employed as feature selection method. In the state level analysis, Support Vector Regression (SVR) model has been applied yielding the coefficients of the variables, which have been found to be important in spelling out non-compliance with the ECtHR decisions. For the case level analysis, different cluster techniques have been utilized and the countries have been grouped into four different clusters. We have found that the states that have relatively high levels of equality before the law, protection of individual liberties, social class equality with regard to enjoying civil liberties, access to justice and free and autonomous election management arrangements, are less susceptible to non-compliance of the decisions of the ECtHR. For the case level analysis, type of violated rights, the existence of dissent in the decision and dissenting votes of national judges for their appointing states affect the compliance behaviour of the states. In addition, a notable result of the research is that if a national judge casts a dissenting vote against the violation judgment of the ECtHR involving the state that appointed him/her, the judgment is likely not to be executed by the respondent state.