European Journal of Law and Economics最新文献

Cartel busting often results in the restructuring of boards of directors, presumably to remove individuals (both executive and non-executive members) who may have been involved in the cartel. This study employs 2 exogenous changes—cartel busting and binding board gender quotas policies—to examine their impact on board gender composition using DiD and Staggered DiD methods. In countries with binding quotas, boards are already undergoing restructuring to include more women, even without the shock of cartel busting. Furthermore, boards increase the percentage of women in non-cartelized firms only when countries introduce binding gender quotas. Binding board gender quota regulations are effective in improving gender balance on corporate boards. Additionally, in countries without binding board gender quotas, only firms sanctioned for cartel conduct show an increase in the percentage of women after cartel busting, compared to non-sanctioned firms. Thus, board gender quota regulations and anti-cartel policies interact to influence the gender composition of sanctioned firms: binding gender policies are effective in achieving more balanced board gender composition, and cartel busting drives more balanced boards in sanctioned firms regardless of whether their countries have binding board quota regulations or not.

We analyse how co-determination is related to non-compliance with the German minimum wage, which was introduced in 2015. The Works Constitution Act (WCA), the law regulating co-determination at the plant level, provides works councils with indirect means to ensure compliance with the statutory minimum wage. Based on this legal situation, our theoretical model predicts that non-compliance is less likely in co-determined firms because works councils enhance the enforcement of the law. The economic correlates of co-determination, such as higher productivity and wages, affect non-compliance in opposite directions. The empirical analysis, using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 2016 and 2019, demonstrates that non-compliance occurs less often for employees in co-determined establishments, while there is no correlation between non-compliance and the difference between the minimum wage and the wage actually paid.

This study has a twofold objective. On the one hand, the comparative analysis of the efficiency of Spanish prisons structured based on three groups of conflict and size, by non-parametric radial and non-radial DEA methods, for 2015–2020. On the other hand, to determine to what extent exogenous factors such as Covid-19, the change of government or economic growth, have influenced the levels of efficiency, controlling for the prison size within each group. The comparative analyses carried out by the Radial and non-radial DEA estimations show important differences in the results. With the non-radial method, there is a clearly decreasing trend in efficiency over time and a greater dispersion of values in the inter-annual distribution. Therefore, the efficiency values of the Penitentiary Centers according to the group to which they belong in relation to their respective efficient frontiers show greater distances or possibilities for improvement in the case of this method compared to the Radial DEA. As for the results of the second stage, the influence of Covid on the management of the centers has had a negative impact on all groups. The implications derived from mandatory confinement have been reflected in greater organizational complexities, regardless of the type of center, in terms of size and criminal complexity. In this sense, there is a positive relationship between efficiency and the size of the centers. In the case of groups 1 (larger size and conflictive) and 2 (both average size and conflictive), a curvilinear shape (U-shape) is captured where a representative part of centers is in the increasing zone of the trend. In the case of group #3, the behavior is linear. Likewise, the influence of the political party in government has been captured. In the first case, differences in efficiency are found, depending on the legislative period, although the effects of the pandemic and its temporal coincidence, and the delay between political decisions and their subsequent implementation and return of results could have had an influence. Finally, the relationship between efficiency and economic growth is positive.

In this paper, we examine whether the platform as well as the sellers violating the intellectual property right (IPR) should be liable. We first show that platform liability is socially better if the number of potential victims is very large. This is mainly due to the general enforcement effect of the platform’s monitoring activity. In the case of specific enforcement in which each patent or trademark holder selling legitimate products tries to detect only the IP violations of its own brand, the monitoring activity of each seller has no spill-over effect, so that the deterrence effect of its monitoring activity remains the same regardless of the number of patent holders. However, in the case of general enforcement in which the platform monitors the possibility of any IP infringement including all legitimate products on the platform, the deterrence effect of its monitoring activity exceeds the monitoring cost if the number of patent holders is large. Then, in a simple model of two sellers without general enforcement effect, we show that under seller liability, awarding punitive damages with punitive multiplier equal to the reciprocal of the enforcement probability induces social optimum in which infringing entry occurs if and only if it is efficient, while platform liability may not induce social optimum.

Conventional wisdom suggests that allowing offenders to choose alternative punishments to a previously existing punishment cannot enhance deterrence, because offenders can simply select the least costly option available. After reviewing the deterrence research literature, we argue that punishment menus may encourage individuals to focus more on how they construe the wrongdoing and view the ethical gravity of their actions. We experimentally test whether people may perceive punishment menus as more deterrent than stand-alone sanctions available within the same menu. Our results suggest that this is possible, and that changes in people’s perceptions are often mediated by the mindset (e.g., calculative, ethical) they adopt to evaluate punishment schemes as well as their impressions of the seriousness of the illegal act.

Violations of environmental regulations often involve multiple parties since companies, as well as employees of the companies, face regulatory obligations and can expend compliance-enhancing effort. When deterring such violations by punishing violators, court judges must determine which party or parties to punish with sanctions. Our study explores such sanction decisions made by Belgian judges in response to environmental offenses and the defendants’ intent to comply as captured by three key Belgian legal elements reflecting culpability: purpose, willingness, and knowledge. Our empirical results reveal that the three culpability factors play strong roles in shaping judges’ sanction decisions, especially the relative use of firm sanctions and employee sanctions. As important, our empirical results strongly demonstrate that judges appear to perceive firm and employee sanctions as complements.

Formal language rights, such as the status as an official, working, national, or regional language, are normally conferred on a language in a well-defined territory, be it a county, a province or an entire country. For a minority language in a federal state, the status as a rule varies from one jurisdiction to another, depending on the number of speakers in the various federal parts of the state. We provide a framework for a normative analysis of this type of language policy. The analysis is based on cost-benefit analysis. We first define and discuss the benefit side assuming benefits to be proportional to the number of beneficiaries of a given planning measure. We then argue that the costs of a planning measure can be adequately described as a function of two variables “number of beneficiaries” and “size of area of application”. It turns out that a change of variables to “number of beneficiaries” and “geographical density of the beneficiaries in the area of application technically simplifies the analysis.” The form of this cost function characterizes different types of planning measures and hence lets us analyze different planning measures in a two-dimensional model characterized by the number of beneficiaries and their geographical concentration in the jurisdiction under consideration. In praxi simple planning rules have to be used in deciding on the implementation of planning measures. The cost structure—as well as the size of the costs of given planning measures—determines how different planning rules function. In addition, also for practical purposes, only a small set of policy categories is tractable. This leads to a multi-stage optimization problem. For any possible category—collection of planning measures—the results of an optimal planning rule have to be found. Based thereon, the selection of categories can be made, also considering administrative costs.

This paper introduces the European journal of law and economics symposium on the “law and economics of indigenous and ethnic minorities.” Indigenous and ethnic minority groups tend to endure economic, political, and social disadvantages resulting from discrimination, inequality, marginalisation and other pathologies. The disadvantaged status of indigenous and ethnic minorities is often reflected in, if not entrenched as the result of, legal specifications and practices that increase the costs of inclusion and widespread participation in socio-economic and political life. Law and economics literature suggests that the costs of discrimination are significant, but that indigenous and ethnic minorities have the capacity to develop their own economic strategies and institutional practices to help ameliorate some of the consequences of discrimination by majoritarian populations. The papers in this symposium consider the law and economics of indigenous and ethnic minorities in a range of historical and contemporary perspectives, including the cases of immigration restrictions, conflicts over land management and property rights, and resources access. This introductory paper also presents a range of topical domains for potential future research by law and economics scholars.

This article presents a survey of the recent empirical literature analysing both the effects and determinants of severance pay on the labour market. Redundancy payments have an effect notably on the aggregate employment level, workers’ job satisfaction, risk-taking and mobility, the nature of the labour contracts (i.e. open-ended or short-term contracts), and the reasons for dismissal (i.e. economic layoff or redundancy for misconduct), while their main determinants are related to union coverage and membership, the aggregate unemployment rate, fiscal policy, judges’ behaviour and some workers’ individual characteristics (e.g. gender, tenure). Insofar as this literature provides a better understanding of the incentives produced by legal rules related to layoffs, it is clear that its conclusions may have implications for policy-making, which we try to illustrate in this article.

Following the example of other European countries in recent years, two major reforms of dismissal regulation were implemented in France in 2016 and 2017. The aim of this article is to assess, from a microeconomic perspective, the effects of these reforms on the hiring and dismissal decisions of French firms. Does making dismissals easier increase dismissals and stimulate hiring? We also ask what is the role of this institutional factor in firms' decisions relative to two other factors: the strategies used by firms in their use of the law and in the management of their workforce; as well as the aggregate effects or the business climate. To this end, we constructed an original database that follows a panel of firms between 2016 and 2019. To take into account the great heterogeneity of employment management practices across firm sizes, this database is then divided into 4 bases—from very, very small firms (fewer than 5 employees) to large firms (50 employees or more). Based on the estimation of several fixed-effects models, we show that the reforms may have played a role in employment decisions, but only in hiring, and especially for small firms (less than 10 employees). However, for these small firms, hiring decisions are also, if not more, driven by employee departures in a human resource management logic. Large firms however are less affected. Finally, aggregate effects reflecting the macroeconomic business climate largely explain the trend in hiring and dismissals over the period, except in the case of large firms, where changes in individual practices may have had a temporary effect on these trends without changing the overall trend.