Volume 13, Issue 3 -

The fear of becoming a victim of crime acts as a barrier to retail trade for consumers, where retailers attempt to reduce such barriers by enduring additional costs such as insurance or security/surveillance; as a result, retail prices are affected by the possibility of crime. This paper attempts to measure such effects by considering the recent experience of Sacramento County in California, where an anti-panhandling ordinance has been issued to protect retailers. As an application, a difference-in-difference approach is employed to identify the effects of the ordinance on Sacramento gasoline prices at the retail level, by considering the gasoline prices in neighboring counties as the control group of a natural experiment. The results show that the anti-panhandling ordinance has resulted in lower gasoline prices in Sacramento County.

We suggest a recognition of non-controlling interest in consolidated financial statements that takes into account the property rights structure within subsidiary companies, in particular, majority requirements on restructurings, which may differ between countries. Our approach rests on a property rights index based on cooperative game theory. This index captures a parent company’s ability to acquire future gains of the subsidiary.

In this article, we study judicial behavior at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). British judges in general, and British high court judges in particular, are perceived to be independent and isolated from political pressure and interference. Furthermore, these judges tend to show a particularly high rate of consensus. This has led many scholars to consider that, contrarily to what holds for several other courts around the world (such as the US Supreme Court), the attitudinal model does not find support when British higher court judges are considered. In this paper we assess whether similar conclusions might be drawn from the JCPC, another British court of last resort. We create a unique dataset to study empirically decisions of the JCPC and investigate the extent to which judges exhibit different judicial behavior depending on the type of appeal being brought to the court, i. e ., Commonwealth, devolution and domestic appeals. Our results indicate a higher polarization of judicial behavior in the context of devolution appeals (as measured by separate opinions). We discuss these results in the context of the comparative judicial behavior literature and the role of courts in the common law world (with particular reference to human rights).

This paper estimates the impact of contract design on the enforceability of quality in outsourced public contracts. Using panel data from 102 cleaning contracts, our results suggest that quality enforcement depends highly on the ex ante contracting process. Such findings are consistent with recent theoretical contributions which consider that the verifiability of agents’ actions is endogenously determined by the principals’ investments in drafting an explicit contract pertaining to the quality of the agent’s output. Moreover, since those quality improvements are not accompanied by price increases, our results suggest that public contract managers have significant leeway to reduce opportunistic behavior for standard transactions.

This paper investigates the impact of unskilled workers’ earnings on crime. We create indexes of skill-biased technological change which vary by state and year, or by state, year, and industry. These indexes are used as instruments for earnings in crime regressions. We analyze US state panels, and also run structural crime equations using micro panel data from NLSY97. Estimated elasticities are markedly larger than those obtained by previous studies. Considering technology being adopted at the regional level does not alter the results appreciably. We also find evidence for asymmetric impact of unskilled workers’ earnings on crime.

We test the relevance of the selection theory of litigation in a contemporary, civil law setting, using Chinese judicial data that span 25 years regarding lawsuits against government agencies. Civil law systems may be characterized by lower costs of litigation and lower rates of settlement than the U.S. legal system, and therefore the presence of selection effects cannot be assumed. We show that selection effects are indeed manifest in Chinese administrative litigation, and suggest that this may be explained by hidden or intangible litigation costs. Our test for selection effects builds on the approach of previous U.S. studies and potentially allows the identification of selection effects to help improve inferences from decided cases. Finally, we examine patterns of settlement and plaintiff wins in pre-litigation administrative appeals in China, and do not find sufficient evidence for selection effects in this process. This could potentially be explained if most appellants pursuing administrative appeals do not intend to litigate.