International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

Since the infamous riot of 1967, high crime rates and negative media reports have labeled the city of Detroit as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. Using a Spatial Dynamic Panel Data model with both individual and time fixed effects to capture the unobserved heterogeneity as well as the time varying common factors, we investigate the spatial and temporal interactions of criminal activities among the block groups in Detroit. The results indicate that the crime incidents in a block is correlated with the average crime incidents in neighboring block groups contemporaneously, with an estimated coefficient of 0.4758, and the block crime incidents is also correlated with the average crime incidents in neighboring blocks from the previous year, with an estimated coefficient of 0.1572. And crime incidents in a block are positively correlated with its own crime incidents in the previous year. The findings are robust against different model specifications based on alternative spatial weights matrices. The results for both violent crimes and property crimes also suggest strong spatial and temporal correlations among neighboring blocks, providing suggestive and preliminary evidence for policy implementation.

In this study we investigate the effect of female director on corporate social responsibility (CSR) by taking the advantage of the introduction of legal gender quota that led to the exogenous change in the female representation in corporate board around the world. We find that the “gender quote” reforms effectively increase gender diversity and improve CSR performance. When comparing the legislation-based regulations with governance code-based regulations, we find that the former brings stronger effects on CSR performance. Finally, the effects are more pronounced in countries with higher gender equality or common law legal systems.

Theories on electoral accountability argue that politicians have strong incentives to avoid punishment from voters for poor administrative abilities. As their chances of reelection can be harmed by failure of businesses, politicians may encourage the speed up of insolvency proceedings to mitigate the voters’ punishment before the elections. Using a sample of 82 countries covering the period 2005–2017, we examined how legislative and presidential elections affect the time required to resolve corporate insolvency. Surprisingly, panel estimates reveal that the length of time to resolve insolvency tends to actually increase during periods of legislative elections and one year prior to such elections in the case of rehabilitation procedures. As the political agenda of the new government can affect the efficiency of restructuring plans, the uncertainty of legislative election outcomes can incentivize debtor and creditors to prolong the resolution of a firm’s reorganization to adjust the plan and/or adopt the most suitable plan. Additionally, our econometric approach reports no significant association between the duration of insolvency procedures and the cycle of presidential elections.

Bank discouragement is one of the most important factors preventing firms from accessing credit. This discouragement stems from strong information asymmetry between firm and bank. To reduce this asymmetry, the latter can either gather information from the firm or access public information on the firm through credit databases. We argue that the presence of credit bureaus, set up by the regulator, which reduces information asymmetry, helps reduce banking discouragement. More specifically, this study is the first to use credit registries to capture the occurrence of screening errors. Our results clearly suggest that the probability of being discouraged decreases when creditor information is available. This phenomenon is even more obvious in regard to more opaque structures, such as risky firms or small and medium-sized firms. In contrast, relationship lending reduces the importance of external creditor information in determining the extent to which borrowers are discouraged. Our results are consistent with previous research on information asymmetry in financial intermediation and show the importance of the legal environment in which firms operate for their financial decisions.

Since Federation,² the ratio of people living outside capital cities to those living within these cities have been declining in all six States. Historically, Australia opted for a regulatory approach that favoured in favouring satellite towns around state capitals, such as Newcastle and the Gold Coast, over the alternative of decentralised regional urban centres, such as Wagga Wagga or Townsville. The latest phase of this planning paradigm envisages integrating these satellites and their capital cities into mega-metropolises. Notwithstanding the benefits from agglomeration, rectifying the observed imbalance assumes an urgency not only through a national security imperative but also through social equity. To analyse the cause of this population decline, I use a theoretical model to explain how sub-national state political accountability distorts incentives when it comes to the provision of public goods. The equilibrium provision is not Pareto optimal given the observed population distribution externality. The inefficient provision of public goods is causing more people to choose to live in the capital city, which in turn creates a vicious circle of worsening population distribution. The model suggests that breaking this circle requires Coasean bargaining so that eliminating the externality is assigned to the Australian jurisdiction that can do so at the lowest cost. Surrender and acceptance agreements under section 111 of the Australian Constitution furnish a modality for the envisaged bargaining to the end of transforming regional Australia into a national jurisdiction. Whether this efficiency can be realised remains a question of transaction costs and income effects flowing from such jurisdictional reassignment.

People often appear to use irrelevant information in forming judgments about others. Using survey experiments, we show that seemingly irrelevant facts may actually be informative of actors’ choices, which third parties can use to update their beliefs. Specifically, we show that subjects’ perceived severity and recommended punishment for offenses are significantly increasing in the number of lawyers representing defendants. However, once subjects are informed that the defendant was randomly assigned a specific number of lawyers, the significant relationship between the perceived seriousness of the offense and the number of lawyers largely vanishes. Thus, third parties in our benchmark analysis may be using the defendant’s legal team size as a proxy to update their beliefs regarding the nature of the offense committed, as opposed to being affected by irrelevant factors in forming judgments. This is because randomization makes it impossible for third parties to draw inferences regarding the nature of the offense committed by the defendant based on the number of lawyers. However, for some offenses, we find that increasing the number of lawyers raises third parties’ recommended sanctions even when the number of lawyers is randomly determined, which is consistent with a psychological phenomenon called ‘luck envy’.

Digital content today is governed by online providers like Facebook or YouTube. Increasingly, these providers are expected to enforce the law by removing illegal content, such as copyright infringement or hate speech. Typically, once they are notified of its existence, they have to assess it and, if infringing, remove it. Otherwise, they face liability. This system of content moderation is a form of delegation of the state’s tasks to private parties. In literature, it is empirically established that some schemes of delegated enforcement can trigger substantial false positives, mostly due to over-compliance by providers and under-assertion of rights by affected content creators. This results in a phenomenon known as over-blocking: collateral removal of lawful content. We conduct a laboratory experiment to test a possible solution to this issue, as proposed by Husovec (2016). Our results show that an external dispute resolution mechanism subject to a particular fee structure can significantly reduce over-compliance by providers and improve the accuracy of their decisions, largely thanks to the content creators taking initiative. It does so by re-calibrating the typical asymmetry of incentives under the delegated enforcement schemes. The principles behind the solution have the potential to improve also other schemes of delegated enforcement where providers have weak incentives to properly execute delegated tasks in the public interest.

The voting gender gap characterises several countries and is likely to translate into the composition of elected assemblies and governments. Starting from the given preferences of the electors, different electoral rules may translate this gap into different outcomes in terms of parliament composition. To amplify or attenuate this gap results in generating a sort of gender representation bias. This paper investigates if and to what extent different electoral rules generate gender representation bias when translating votes into seats. It proposes a theoretical framework to capture the potential of an electoral system to amplify or attenuate the voting gender gap. Then, using survey data and different indices of representativeness and governability, this paper provides empirical tests for the theoretical framework. Both the theory and the simulations indicate that majority systems magnify the gender gap while proportional rules are likely to reproduce it with minimal distortions.

Economic analyses of antitrust institutions have thus far focused predominantly on optimal penalties and the design of substantive legal rules, and have largely ignored the standard of proof used in trials as a policy tool in shaping behavior. This neglected tool can play a unique role in the antitrust context, where a given firm may have the choice to engage in exceptional anticompetitive or procompetitive behavior, or simply follow more conventional business practices. The standard of proof used in determining the legality of a firm’s conduct affects not only whether the firm chooses to engage in pro- versus anticompetitive behavior, but also whether it chooses to remain passive. We introduce a model to investigate the effects of this additional tradeoff on the optimal standard of proof. The nature of these effects depends upon the relationship between the beneficial impact of procompetitive behavior versus the harmful impacts of anticompetitive behavior, since this relationship is what determines the costs associated with Type I and Type II error. Adopting Judge Easterbrook’s presumption that preventing procompetitive behavior is more harmful than allowing anticompetitive behavior, we show that the standard of proof facing plaintiffs in antitrust cases ought to be stronger than preponderance of the evidence.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of corporate legal insiders in the Korean market from January 2010 to December 2020. This market has received very little attention from the academic community, while being one of the leading emerging economies. As per prior studies, we consider mainly buy transactions in order to draw robust conclusions as to insiders’ performance, since sales transactions do not necessarily represent a strong signal from insiders, as different reasons could push an investor to close her position. Our three-level analysis allows us to conclude that corporate insiders in the Korean market do possess market timing skills that enable them to consistently outperform random, outside investors over time. However, we note that this market timing ability is, to a large extent, linked to the hierarchical level of the insider in question, and consequently to its access to more crucial information. This brings us to the conclusion that information asymmetry is not only important between corporate insiders and outsiders, but even within organizations.