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on Law and Economics |
| By: | Galbiati, Roberto; Ouss, Aurélie; Philippe, Arnaud |
| Abstract: | We study how local labor market conditions and information about jobs affect recidivism among former inmates. Our identification strategy exploits daily variations on new job vacancies and news coverage of job openings and closings at the county level, merged with individual-level administrative data on inmates released from French prisons. Overall job creations do not affect recidivism, but inmates released when more jobs in manufacturing are created are less likely to recidivate. We also show that media coverage of job creation reduces recidivism, beyond actual employment opportunities, suggesting implications for crime-control policies: information about employment contributes to reduce recidivism. |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:32064&r=law |
| By: | Kakizawa, Hisanobu |
| Abstract: | Social preferences for the punishment of free riders are critical for generating cooperative behavior in human society. Focusing on the receiving fees of Japan´s public broadcaster, this study analyses how punishment of free riders, that is, the strengthening of legal responses against them, affects the willingness to pay (WTP) of general viewers. Preferences regarding punishments were found to have significant positive effects on WTP. Furthermore, differences of perception about the institutional framework around receiving fees and differences in type concerning cooperative behavior were found to influence these effects clearly. |
| Keywords: | public goods,social preference,free riding,punishment,WTP |
| JEL: | D63 H41 K42 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itsp17:168496&r=law |
| By: | Angela K. Dills; Sietse Goffard; Jeffrey Miron |
| Abstract: | By the end of 2016, 28 states had liberalized their marijuana laws: by decriminalizing possession, by legalizing for medical purposes, or by legalizing more broadly. More states are considering such policy changes even while supporters and opponents continue to debate their impacts. Yet evidence on these liberalizations remains scarce, in part due to data limitations. We use data from Monitoring the Future’s annual surveys of high school seniors to evaluate the impact of marijuana liberalizations on marijuana use, other substance use, alcohol consumption, attitudes surrounding substance use, youth health outcomes, crime rates, and traffic accidents. These data have several advantages over those used in prior analyses. We find that marijuana liberalizations have had minimal impact on the examined outcomes. Notably, many of the outcomes predicted by critics of liberalizations, such as increases in youth drug use and youth criminal behavior, have failed to materialize in the wake of marijuana liberalizations. |
| JEL: | K14 |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23779&r=law |
| By: | Philippe, Arnaud |
| Abstract: | This paper documents the effect of peers’ incarceration on an individual’s criminal activity within small criminal groups. Using established criminal groups, I built a 48-month panel that records the criminal status, Individual imprisonment status and imprisonment status of group members. Panel regressions with individual fixed effects allows me to document five facts. First, the incarceration of a peer is associated with a 5 per cent decrease in the arrest rate among groups composed of two persons. No effect is observed among bigger groups. Second, this effect is present even for incarceration following lone crimes, ruling out an explanation based on common shocks. Third, the probability of committing a group crime strongly decreases, and there is no shift to crime with other peers or lone crimes. Four, this general effect hides significant within-group heterogeneity. The results are consistent with the idea that ‘leaders’ are not affected by the incarceration of ‘followers’. Five, the effect seems to be driven by lower risky behaviour among offenders who remain free, and not by ‘criminal capital’ loss or deterrence. |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:32042&r=law |
| By: | Watanabe, Mayuko |
| Abstract: | The Japanese law "Act on Regulation and Punishment of Acts Relating to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, and the Protection of Children" (the Child Pornography Prohibition Act) does not regulate virtual child pornography such as comics, cartoons, animation, and games. As a result, cases in which Japan-made virtual child pornography influenced sexual crimes against children frequently occur not only domestically but also internationally. Japan has been criticized of that by the international community. This study set a research question on what the Japanese viewpoint is over regulatory policy on virtual child pornography. It analyzed the legislative process of the second revision of the Child Pornography Prohibition Act in order to reveal a part of the viewpoint in Japan. The study found that in discussing the legislative process over virtual child pornography regulation, the viewpoint of giving priority to 'freedom of expression' was more dominant than that of protecting the human rights of children. |
| Keywords: | Regulatory policy of child pornography,Virtuality,Human rights,Freedom of expression |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itsp17:168547&r=law |
| By: | Gregory DeAngelo (West Virginia University, Department of Economics); Emily G. Owens (University of Pennsylvania, Department of Criminology) |
| Abstract: | We estimate the role that law enforcement officer experience has on the probability of punishment, using a unique data set of tickets issued by the Idaho State Police linked to human resource records. All else equal, officers issue fewer tickets earlier in their career than later in their career. Quasi-exogenous shocks to an officer’s task-specific experience, generated by law changes, cause a temporary reduction in the frequency with which a subset of troopers “use†those laws, creating disparities in the likelihood that individual citizens are cited for law violations. The reduction in ticketing in response to a law change is largest for newer troopers, and law changes later in a trooper’s career have a smaller effect on his use of that law. |
| Keywords: | law enforcement |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wvu:wpaper:17-19&r=law |
| By: | Tröger, Tobias |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the bail-in tool under the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) and predicts that it will not reach its policy objective. To make this argument, this paper first describes the policy rationale that calls for mandatory private sector involvement (PSI). From this analysis, the key features for an effective bail-in tool can be derived. These insights serve as the background to make the case that the European resolution framework is likely ineffective in establishing adequate market discipline through risk-reflecting prices for bank capital. The main reason for this lies in the avoidable embeddedness of the BRRD's bail-in tool in the much broader resolution process, which entails ample discretion of the authorities also in forcing private sector involvement. Moreover, the idea that nearly all positions on the liability side of a bank's balance sheet should be subjected to bail-in is misguided. Instead, a concentration of PSI in instruments that fall under the minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) is preferable. Finally, this paper synthesized the prior analysis by putting forward an alternative regulatory approach that seeks to disentangle private sector involvement as a precondition for effective bank-resolution as much as possible form the resolution process as such. |
| Keywords: | bail-in,private sector involvement,precautionary recapitalization,cross-border insolvency,market discipline |
| JEL: | G01 G18 G21 G28 K22 K23 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:imfswp:116&r=law |
| By: | Jorge García Hombrados (Department of Economics, University of Sussex) |
| Abstract: | This study uses age discontinuities in the degree of exposure to a law that raised the legal age of marriage for women from 15 to 18 years in some regions of Ethiopia to provide the first evidence on (a) the beneficial effects on child marriage and infant mortality of laws that ban underage marriage and on (b) the causal effect of delaying women's age at cohabitation on infant mortality using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. The results show that although the introduction of the law did not end child marriage among Ethiopian women, it had large effects on the incidence of child marriage and on the probability of infant mortality of the first born child. Besides, the results suggest that a one-year delay in women's age at cohabitation during teenage years decreases the incidence of infant mortality of the first born by 3.8 percentage points. The size of this effect is comparable to the joint impact on child mortality of measles, BCG, DPT, Polio and Maternal Tetanus vaccinations. This effect on infant mortality seems to be closely linked to the impact of delaying cohabitation on the age of women at first birth. |
| Keywords: | child marriage, infant mortality, family economics |
| JEL: | K0 |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sus:susewp:1317&r=law |
| By: | Bräutigam, Rainer; Spengel, Christoph; Stutzenberger, Kathrin |
| Abstract: | Ongoing tax reform processes, competitive pressures and the consequences of the financial and sovereign debt crisis have considerably shaped the tax systems of the Member States of the European Union in the last two decades. Our paper combines a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the development of European tax structures based on a unique and comprehensive dataset for the EU-25 Member States between 1998 and 2015. Especially among the EU-15 Member States, we still find evidence for the often-cited trend of tax rate cut cum tax base broadening. In this context, we identify interest deduction limitation rules and loss provisions as main drivers of tax base broadening. Furthermore, the quantitative analysis of effective tax burden scenarios shows that Member States seem to additionally rely on an increased taxation of dividends to balance possible revenue losses associated with reduced corporate income tax rates. |
| Keywords: | Tax Policy,Corporate Taxation,European Union |
| JEL: | H20 H25 K34 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:17034&r=law |
| By: | Hayashi, Koichiro |
| Abstract: | Though the international laws are applicable not only to the real world but also to cyberspace, the Internet is vulnerable against cyberattack, because it is fairly difficult to identify the real actor, when the attack is made by ‘bots’ or through anonymization methods(attribution problem). As the early Internet took for granted that the research community can maintain self-governance easily, concept of security-by-design is lacking. Hence the offenders have advantages over defenders, and the only effective measure for the defenders is the sharing of cybersecurity incident information, in order to analyze the characteristics of attack, and prepare for the next one. There are three types of sharing mechanism in the world; USA, EU, and UK models. This paper compares these models, and tries to extract some lessons for the future as well as for the other countries or areas. The most important factors for choosing the proper model are aggregated comparative advantages of defense, police, intelligence, and IT-related industry powers of the State concerned. |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itsp17:168485&r=law |
| By: | Tröger, Tobias |
| Abstract: | The bail-in tool as implemented in the European bank resolution framework suffers from severe shortcomings. To some extent, the regulatory framework can remedy the impediments to the desirable incentive effect of private sector involvement (PSI) that emanate from a lack of predictability of outcomes, if it compels banks to issue a sufficiently sized minimum of high-quality, easy to bail-in (subordinated) liabilities. Yet, even the limited improvements any prescription of bail-in capital can offer for PSI's operational effectiveness seem compromised in important respects. The main problem, echoing the general concerns voiced against the European bail-in regime, is that the specifications for minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) are also highly detailed and discretionary and thus alleviate the predicament of investors in bail-in debt, at best, only insufficiently. Quite importantly, given the character of typical MREL instruments as non-runnable long-term debt, even if investors are able to gauge the relevant risk of PSI in a bank's failure correctly at the time of purchase, subsequent adjustment of MREL-prescriptions by competent or resolution authorities potentially change the risk profile of the pertinent instruments. Therefore, original pricing decisions may prove inadequate and so may market discipline that follows from them. The pending European legislation aims at an implementation of the already complex specifications of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) for Total Loss Absorbing Capacity (TLAC) by very detailed and case specific amendments to both the regulatory capital and the resolution regime with an exorbitant emphasis on proportionality and technical fine-tuning. What gets lost in this approach, however, is the key policy objective of enhanced market discipline through predictable PSI: it is hardly conceivable that the pricing of MREL-instruments reflects an accurate risk-assessment of investors because of the many discretionary choices a multitude of agencies are supposed to make and revisit in the administration of the new regime. To prove this conclusion, this chapter looks in more detail at the regulatory objectives of the BRRD's prescriptions for MREL and their implementation in the prospectively amended European supervisory and resolution framework. |
| Keywords: | MREL,TLAC,G-SIB,bail-in,bank resolution |
| JEL: | G01 G18 G21 G28 K22 K23 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:imfswp:117&r=law |
| By: | Blanes I Vidal, Jordi; Mastrobuoni, Giovanni |
| Abstract: | An influential literature has used the aftermath of terrorist attacks to estimate large effects of police street deployment on crime. However, the elasticities obtained in these settings may not easily extrapolate to more standard circumstances. This paper exploits a natural experiment that aimed to increase police presence in more than 6,000 well-defined areas, by economically-realistic amounts and under relatively normal circumstances. Using data transmitted by GPS devices worn by police officers, we first document exogenous and discontinuous changes in patrolling intensity. We then find that the relation between crime and police patrolling is not statistically different from zero, and that the standard errors are small enough to reject relatively small elasticities. We discuss and empirically evaluate explanations for the apparent lack of deterrence. |
| Keywords: | crime; deterrence; Natural Experiments; Police |
| JEL: | D29 K40 |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12266&r=law |