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on Law and Economics |
| By: | Fabio Italo Martinenghi |
| Abstract: | Equality before the law is a human right, and access to high-quality legal aid for indigent defendants is essential to enforce it. In a context where all defendants have access to a lawyer, I study the impact of denying legal aid on court outcomes. I combine double machine learning and a new administrative dataset linking aid to court outcomes in New South Wales, Australia, to learn the assignment function, whose inputs are known. I find that applicants who fail the means test and hire private lawyers are 10 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated than if they passed and relied on legal aid. Given an average incarceration length of nearly four years, this gap is significant. However, I find evidence suggesting that they spend more time in jail if they are incarcerated. A government preference for broad access to aid over allocated time per case could explain this pattern. Keywords: Indigent Defense, Crime, Criminal Justice. JEL: I30, K14, H44. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.05211 |
| By: | Hui, Ruilam |
| Abstract: | This project contains a legal research paper examining sentencing principles in Hong Kong's corruption regime through the high-profile case of Ho Siu-tung, a Chief Inspector of Police who was sentenced to thirty months imprisonment for accepting over HK$1.14 million in bribes from a businessman. The paper analyzes the legal framework governing corruption offences in Hong Kong, compares the Ho case with other corruption cases involving law enforcement officers, and examines personal mitigation factors including the defendant's exceptional career trajectory, his mother's cancer diagnosis, and his loss of housing and retirement benefits. The paper argues that while the court properly balanced aggravating and mitigating factors, the case exposes tensions in sentencing between deterrence and rehabilitation for high-ranking public officials who fall from grace. |
| Date: | 2026–08–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:4vpd7_v1 |
| By: | Julian Vedeler Johnsen (UiB - University of Bergen); Laura Khoury (LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides direct evidence that shared incarceration can facilitate the formation of post-release criminal partnerships. Using Norwegian administrative data linking prison spells to police case identifiers, we measure network ties through subsequent co-offending. We exploit time-based variation in exposure within facilities by comparing inmate pairs in the same facility who differ only in whether their spells overlapped. Overlap is associated with a 37% increase in five-year co-offending relative to comparable non-overlapping pairs, robust to extensive controls and timing-based restrictions. Effects are stronger in environments and for pairs where interaction is plausibly more intense, highlighting network formation as a plausible mechanism. |
| Keywords: | Criminal networks, Criminal experience, Co-offending, Recidivism, Criminal behavior, Incarceration, Prison inmates |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05726614 |
| By: | Cumming, Douglas |
| Abstract: | Journal-level citation metrics have become the price system of academic science. They allocate prestige, steer submissions, anchor tenure and promotion, drive institutional rankings, and, through subscription demand and article-processing charges, convert directly into publisher revenue. This Article argues that when a single dominant firm organizes many journals under common control, coordinated conduct inflating those metrics can generate large private gains while inflicting a diffuse public harm that United States law, as currently configured, reaches poorly. The Article does not conclude that such conduct is beyond legal reach. It concludes that the reach is jurisdictional and structural: the doctrines best suited to the harm sit outside the forum in which the leading case was brought. Using a documented episode involving a cluster of Elsevier finance journals as its case study, the Article audits the governing doctrine. Antitrust, after the January 2026 dismissal of Uddin v. Elsevier, confronts a relevant-market problem, an intra-enterprise barrier under Copperweld, and a standing bottleneck under Illinois Brick, which together leave metric manipulation poorly served under Section 1. Two routes remain open: an inconsistency in the publisher's own litigation positions on editorial control, bearing directly on the single-entity premise, and the availability of Section 2 and of abuse-of-dominance liability abroad. Defamation law, governed by Milkovich and the scientific-debate abstention of ONY, very likely does not reach a publisher's expression-of-concern notice. Contract, tortious-interference, and retaliation theories fare no better. The Article states the publisher's strongest defenses and identifies what survives them. It shows that the recent dismissal rests on a view of concerted action in tension with the circuit's own precedent, and argues that the publisher's prolonged inaction, despite notice that an editor was handling his own papers and that citation stacking was underway, presents a case of willful blindness bearing on culpability and pretext. Comparative analysis shows EU and UK abuse-of-dominance law to be a materially more hospitable forum than U.S. antitrust, because the single-firm character of the conduct is fatal under the Sherman Act but not under Article 102 TFEU. Canada has moved furthest: following reforms in force from June 2025, its Competition Act combines single-firm abuse-of-dominance liability with public-interest standing and a disgorgement remedy measured by the defendant's gain rather than any plaintiff's loss, removing at once the barriers of concerted action, standing, and provable individualized loss that defeat the American claim. The Article closes with a reform program centered on metric-integrity trigger duties, coordination and pricing transparency, evenhanded conflict standards, and protection for scholars who document publisher conduct. |
| Date: | 2026–08–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:ek6ty_v1 |
| By: | Jeffrey Grogger; Andrew Jordan; Tom Kirchmaier |
| Abstract: | Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, with little support beyond a flawed questionnaire. To analyze their decisions, we first develop methods to deal with a censoring problem that arises because the officer’s prediction may change the outcome she was attempting to predict. Even after adjusting for censoring, we find predictive performance to be low, even lower in some cases than what one would expect by chance. We next ask whether their predictions represent mistakes, and provide several types of confirmatory evidence. We ask how officers formulate their predictions, and we find evidence consistent with representativeness bias, overreaction, and categorization and selective attention. We find that higher-skill officers use information not captured by the questionnaire to improve their predictions, whereas lower-skill officers use such information in ways that reduce accuracy. |
| JEL: | D91 K4 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35672 |
| By: | Mutsamwira, Sam |
| Abstract: | The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) provides uniform laws that govern transnational sales contracts between businesses operating in Contracting States, or when the law of a Contracting State is applicable according to conflict of laws rules. Currently 97 Contracting States worldwide have adopted the CISG, including New Zealand. Article 42 CISG requires a seller to deliver to the buyer goods that are free from any third-party intellectual property rights (IPRs). The territoriality of IPRs means that a seller may not be the party best suited to know the existence of any third-party IPRs in certain jurisdictions compared to the buyer. Article 42 creates uncertainties for parties involved in international commerce with regards to intellectual property (IP) disputes and can lead to unsatisfactory results. In this paper, I explore whether an aggrieved party to a contractual dispute about a third-party IPR claim can pursue a cause of action under art 79. I apply a two-stage enquiry to selected cases, under art 42 (stage one) and then art 79 (stage two) of the CISG, and demonstrate that a losing party in a third-party IPR dispute is also unlikely to succeed under art 79, even in rare circumstances. |
| Keywords: | United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods; Article 42 CISG; Article 79 CISG; Intellectual Property Rights; Third-party claims; Liability exemption; Territoriality of IPRs; International commercial sales; CISG; IPRs; IP |
| JEL: | F13 F19 K12 K33 O34 |
| Date: | 2025–01–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:128465 |
| By: | Jaramillo Abad Gleymang Yubert (Osaka School of International Public Policy, the University of Osaka); Uwasu Michinori (Graduate School of Economics, The University of Osaka) |
| Abstract: | Socio-environmental issues are often studied by focusing on enforcement or compliance in isolation, with emphasis on sanction design. This study proposes a joint compliance–enforcement framework, in which sustainable governance emerges from the balanced, cyclical interaction between firms’ compliance decisions and authorities’ institutional capacities. The holder’s compliance decision is modeled as an expected-utility maximization problem. We formally derive that the post-detection probability—as a measure of institutional credibility—exerts a stronger marginal influence on holders’ compliance than the raw detection probability. This result holds through two independent channels: Arrow–Pratt global risk-aversion and information-theoretic foundations. Sustainable incentives are modeled as a positive integral payoff, distinct from the illicit-benefit deterrence. The governance multiplier result shows that improving post-detection probability simultaneously amplifies both deterrence and incentive channels. The framework is illustrated using stylized facts from large-scale fisheries in Peru and yields three testable implications with falsification conditions on compliance effort and repercussions. |
| Keywords: | Compliance, Environmental governance, Institutional credibility, Regulatory enforcement, Sustainability |
| JEL: | Q58 K42 D81 D82 L51 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osp:wpaper:26e010 |
| By: | Vivek Bhattacharya; Gastón Illanes; Avner A. Kreps; José D. Salas; David Stillerman |
| Abstract: | Prospective merger simulations are a commonly used tool in industrial organization and antitrust, but evidence about their accuracy and predictive ability is limited. We study 101 mergers in consumer packaged goods and compare the realizations of price changes with predictions from merger simulations. In our sample of consummated mergers, predicted price changes from merger simulations are typically larger than realized ones. Despite the overprediction, we find that full merger simulations are more effective than both structural presumptions and approximations of the merger effect at identifying mergers with large price changes. |
| JEL: | D43 K21 L13 L41 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35473 |