Using a natural experiment to measure the impact of swifter punishment on criminal recidivism

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Measure the impact of swifter punishment on the timing of first imprisonment and on criminal recidivism among young violent offenders. A policy reform in 1994...     

Board composition and corporate governance–A multivariate analysis of listed Danish firms

The article conducts a multivariate analysis using a sample of listed Danish firms in order to examine what describes board composition. This issue also relates to corporate law that stipulates the legal boundaries of board composition. In recent years, several European countries, including Denmark, have issued various codes for good corporate governance, in the form of soft law. Such initiatives have been launched, even though the questions of what describes board composition, as well as, the legal profession's influence on board structure, have not been fully uncovered. This study shows that four factors explain Danish board structure. These factors can be interpreted by the following dimensions; the lawyer oriented, the business person oriented, the internationally oriented and finally the traditionally oriented board. Thus, the paper shows that a higher proportion of insider ownership increases the first dimension, whereas a higher remuneration increases the business person orientation of the board. If firm size increases, the international dimension of the board increases and if a firm experiences less growth board structure becomes more traditional. classification G32 . K22     

The Tort Remedy in Search and Seizure Cases: A Case Study in Juror Decision Making

Civil suits for damage awards against police officers alleged to have engaged in illegal searches have long been suggested as an alternative to the exclusionary rule as a remedy for police misconduct. A review of empirical literature on the incidence and outcomes of such suits suggests that defendant officers often prevail and that the awards do not seem large enough to produce the punishment and deterrence effect often claimed by proponents of the tort remedy. Using an experimental technique involving simulated trials and adults called for jury service as subjects, we examine the effects of two procedural aspects of such suits on juror awards. The extent of municipal liability and the substitution of the U.S. government as plaintiff do not appear to affect the incidence or size of compensatory or punitive damage awards. Denying jurors information about the outcome of the search does appear likely to increase damage awards. The article both explores factors affecting juror decision-making in these cases and illustrates the utility and limitations of the experimental method for testing suggested policy innovations.     

Simulation and Managerial Decision Making:A Double‐Loop Learning Framework

Systems approaches present opportunities for public managers and policy makers to view policies and programs in a broader context. This article presents a framework to explain how simulation modeling promotes double‐loop learning in management teams by building and exploring collective mental models as well as by enhancing accuracy of the mental models. The authors discuss the types of problems that may benefit from simulation modeling and illustrate how double‐loop learning occurs in the process of dynamic hypothesis testing. Using a case from New York State's Division of Disability Determination, the article shows how simulation modeling built confidence in a management team's decision by providing the team with tools to share and examine multiple hypotheses about a declining trend in initial disability recipients in the state between 1998 and 2004.     

DOES OWNERSHIP MATTER FOR THE PROVISION OF PROFESSIONALIZED SERVICES? HIP OPERATIONS AT PUBLICLY AND PRIVATELY OWNED CLINICS IN DENMARK

In terms of clinical procedures (to take the example used in this article, hip operations), both public and private organizations provide highly professionalized services. For this service type, our knowledge about ownership differences is sparse. To begin to fill this gap, we investigate how the ownership of hip clinics affects professional behaviour, treatment quality and patient satisfaction. The comparison of private and public hip clinics is based on data from the Danish Hip Arthroplasty Register and the Danish Central Patient Register combined with 20 semi-structured interviews. We find that private clinics employ stronger individual financial incentives and try harder to increase the income/costs ratio than do public clinics. Private clinics optimize non-clinical factors such as waiting time much more than public clinics and have fewer complication-prone patients than public clinics. However, the clinical procedures are very similar in the two types of clinics. Private clinics do not achieve better clinical results, but patient satisfaction is nevertheless higher with private clinics. The implication is that ownership matters for highly professionalized services, but professionalism neutralizes some – but not all – ownership differences.     

Juror decision making,attitudes, and the hindsight bias

This study examines juror decision making in civil suits against police officers alleged to have engaged in illegal searches, using simulated case materials and mock jurors drawn both from adults called for jury service and a student subject pool. The experiment assesses the impact of a cognitive process (thehindsight bias) and of individual attitudes on awards and finds that both are related to juror decisions. We test a theoretical model that specifies that both attitudes and outcome knowledge exercise their influence upon the damage award decision by means of their impact on interpretation of testimony. Causal models of the decision-making process appear to support the role played by interpretation of evidence as a mediator between individual attributes and juror decisions.We are indebted to Reid Hastie, Tom Tyler, Phoebe Ellsworth, Jack Heinz, Robert Nelson, Rayman Solomon, and Bonnie Fisher for assistance with various aspects of the design, data collection, and analysis reported here. Financial support was provided by the American Bar Foundation, and the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research and the Dispute Resolution Research Center, both at Northwestern University.John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.     

The solution to the Tullock rent-seeking game when R>2: Mixed-strategy equilibria and mean dissipation rates

In Tullock's rent-seeking model, the probability a player wins the game depends on expenditures raised to the power R. We show that a symmetric mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium exists when R>2, and that overdissipation of rents does not arise in any Nash equilibrium. We derive a tight lower bound on the level of rent dissipation that arises in a symmetric equilibrium when the strategy space is discrete, and show that full rent dissipation occurs when the strategy space is continuous. Our results are shown to be consistent with recent experimental evidence on the dissipation of rents.     

A test of two models of adolescent egocentrism

The present study investigated two predictors of adolescent egocentrism: formal operational ability and interpersonal understanding. Participants included 87 adolescents from four age groups. Two measures of adolescent egocentrism, two formal operations tasks, and an interview assessing level of interpersonal understanding were administered. Results showed that interpersonal understanding level predicted egocentrism as measured by the personal fable subscale of the Adolescent Egocentrism-Sociocentrism scale, whereas formal operations was not a predictor of any form of adolescent egocentrism. Implications for future research and the relationship between egocentrism and social cognitive development are discussed.This study is based on the master's thesis work of the first author, which was directed by the second author.Received Ph.D. from Wayne State University. Research interest in adult social-cognitive development. To whom correspondence should be addressed.     

Using feedback simulation to test educational finance policies

A system dynamics model of the dynamics of special education reimbursement policies, based upon work completed in Massachusetts, is presented. The model is used to analyze the causes of unstable growth in special education costs and to propose policy options for controlling such costs. Because of an elaborated ability to represent the behaviors of local school districts, the system dynamics technology was found to be ideally suited to this type of policy analysis. However, the existence of the elaborated feedback structure would make it extremely cumbersome to use the system dynamics model to project annual costs on a locality-by-locality basis, such projections being the principal strength of traditional education finance models. This trade-off between two modeling technologies suggests that analysts must carefully match their audience, purpose, and modeling technology to attain best analyses.