The risk of detection

The clearance rate is often used as an indicator of the risk of detection, in spite of the fact that these are different matters. This article suggests a method to make estimates of the risk of detection based on information from the Swedish crime statistics. The risk of detection is expressed as a function of the dark figure. Empirical estimates of the risk are given for drunken driving, residential burglary, and assault between strangers. These estimates are followed up with some calculations concerning the impact of crime activity level on the risk of getting caught. One major conclusion of the findings is that the risk of detection varies very moderately with the dark figure. This means that if there is some knowledge of the dark figure, it is often possible to make fairly good estimates of the risk of detection.     

Coercion and the Global Spread of Securities Regulation

Securities laws, overseen by independent regulatory agencies, have spread around the world. This article argues that coercion has played a more critical role in the spread of regulatory models than previously acknowledged. In particular, I argue that globally integrated markets can provide powerful regulators and governments with strong incentives to actively promote the export of their regulatory models. Case study evidence and the analysis of a global data set on the establishment of US-style securities regulatory regimes between 1973 and 2007 lend support to the crucial role of the US government and the US Securities and Exchange Commission in spreading the US securities regulatory model around the world.     

Not letting ‘bad apples’ spoil the bunch: Democratization and strict international organization accession rules

To solve their domestic and international problems, democratizing states often form new international organizations. In doing so, they face the question of institutional design: what types of rules and provisions should be included in the charter of the new international organization? We analyze this question through the lens of accession rules, with an emphasis on voting rules. We argue that democratizing states have strong incentives to design organizations with strict accession rules. Organizations with strict accession rules allow the founding members to regulate entry. This is particularly useful for transitional democracies, as democratizing states are initially unable to gain entry into the lucrative existing international organizations operated by the established democracies. Using original data on accession voting rules in 324 international organizations, we find strong evidence in support of our claims.     

Willingness to Pay for Solar Lanterns: Does the Trial Period Play a Role?

Where electricity access is limited, solar lanterns are a viable and relatively inexpensive source of basic lighting for households. However, the creation of commercially viable business models for solar lanterns is difficult because the customers are poor and make decisions under tight liquidity constraints. To understand the economics of technology adoption in the case of solar lanterns, we conduct a field experiment on willingness to pay (WTP) for solar lanterns in rural Uttar Pradesh. Applying the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak method of eliciting WTP, we evaluate the ability of a trial period and postponed payment to increase sales. We find no evidence for the effectiveness of the trial period and only weak evidence for the positive effect of postponed payment. Overall, WTP for the product among the customers is low. There is no clear evidence for concerns about the uncertain quality of the product, liquidity constraints, or present‐bias. In this context, policies to subsidize very small solar lanterns would not correct a market failure, as people appear to have only a limited interest in the product.     

Terrorism Salience increases System Justification: Experimental Evidence

The issue of international terrorism has figured frequently in recent political debates and media coverage. In the present paper, we explore the question of how the salience of the concept of international terrorism affects the system-justifying tendencies of public opinion. On the basis of Terror Management Theory and System Justification Theory it was hypothesized that terrorism salience would lead to increased system justification. Four experiments with student and non-student adult samples support the hypothesis, yielding a medium-sized average effect of d = 0.47. Across variations in the intensity of focal death-related thoughts, the effect was not subject to boundary conditions typical of mortality salience effects. Social and political psychological implications are discussed.

Bridging the Gap: A Pragmatic Approach to Understanding Critical Criminologies and Policy Influence

The longstanding connection between criminological theory, research and the design and delivery of criminal justice policy has been challenged in the last 3 decades by a variety of constraints such as the rise of neoconservative attitudes, symbolic public discourses about crime, and the proliferation of capture, monitor, and detect strategies brought about by technological innovation. Building on Kevin Haggerty’s (2004. Displaced expertise: three constraints on the policy-relevance of criminological thought. Theoretical Criminology, 8(2), 211–231.) exploration of the external factors that challenge the transition from criminological theory to criminal justice policy and practice, this paper considers internal challenges that may also be relevant. By examining two recent critical criminological orientating strategies, namely left realism and constitutive criminology, the paper concludes by suggesting that an integrated perspective which draws strengths from each of these approaches could assist critical criminologists to better influence policy in the future.

---

Politicians’ outside earnings and electoral competition

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians’ outside earnings. In our framework, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The main hypothesis is that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this hypothesis using a new dataset on outside earnings of members of the German federal assembly and find that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings.