Volume 10, Issue 3

To achieve equality and justice is the main objective of China’s judicial reform. However, due to the scarcity of judicial resources in China, the cost of achieving equality and justice must be considered when designing the judicial system. Thus, how to balance equality, justice and judicial costs has become one of the most complicated questions of the reform. Analysis of the legal fee arrangements provides a unique perspective for this issue. In this paper, we use the method of law and economics to analyze this question. Through setting up a dynamic game model for litigation, we compare the effects of different legal fee arrangements on equality, justice and the social cost. Through data simulation, our theoretical findings are interpreted intuitively. The paper also scrutinizes institutional factors in system designing, which provides useful implications for the judicial reform. In addition, our research findings have amended the inconsistence of results between theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence.

We compare the influence of legal and political factors on the corporate ownership structure of Chinese listed companies. We find that: (1) the improvement of corporate law quality and the less government intervene on firms lead to a decrease in corporate ownership concentration; (2) compared with the provincial corporate law performance, the effects of the provincial government intervention on the concentration of ownership is relatively significant; (3) the impact of government intervention on corporate ownership structure of state-owned firms are larger than that of private firms, whereas the impact of provincial corporate law implementation performance is more significant in samples of private firms. The policy implications are that most China’s SOE reform measures have yet not cure the crux. The success of the reform may primarily depends on the re-examination and restructure of the political institutions.

For this study, I completed a comprehensive review of punishment clauses in the Korean Legal Code from 1985 to 2016. Using a web crawler and text analysis, I gathered data on the laws and then identified the content of the penal sentence in each clause. By investigating the data, I was able to quantify and assess changes over time in: (1) the number of punishment clauses; (2) the severity of sentences; and (3) the balance between imprisonment and fines. In order to examine the causes of these changes, I separated the data into different sentence levels and sectors. I found that low-level punishment clauses had grown quickly, and some of the sectors responsible for the change included civil engineering and sex offenses. This comprehensive review of the penal sentences revealed issues of concern related to overcriminalization, overpenalization, and an imbalance of punishment level in the Korean Legal Code.

The prevalence of the Internet Plus model and mobile applications have brought people into the era of sharing economy, thus accelerating the generation of the “gig-worker.” Foreign experiences have tended to classify gig-workers as employees or as an additional employment category. However, reviewing China’s domestic practices, employment legislation is not enough to keep up with this innovative working style because the work classification and supporting mechanisms for gig-workers have not yet been explicated. This paper identifies the major types of gig-workers that have arisen and investigates 110 court cases to better understand the employment status of gig-workers in China. The empirical results indicate that the judgements of similar facts are diverse in the absence of a unified employment standard. Therefore, it is recommended that the work classification of gig-workers be clarified, lawful access to benefit plans and work protection system be safeguarded, and burden of accident liabilities be fairly distributed.

In this paper, we argue that there is strategic complementarity in criminal behavior. Strategic complementarity arises because the apprehension probability that affects the crime rate depends on the crime rate itself. The natural consequence is the possible multiplicity of the equilibrium crime rate. The actual crime rate is realized by the self-fulfilling nature of the crime rate. Our analysis provides an economic rationalization of the broken window theory as the result of strategic complementarity and self-fulfilling crime rates. Regardless of how effective polices prescribed by the broken window theory are (e.g. removing graffiti, reducing trash in the street, and repairing broken windows), our model demonstrates the theory’s important contribution of introducing to the economics of crime the idea of belief-based deterrence. We also show that the equilibrium crime rate is stable whenever the broken window policy targets the lowest among multiple equilibrium crime rates.