When government programs create inequities: A guide to compensation policies

When the government institutes a program thought to be useful for society as a whole, such as building a highway or controlling air pollution, those that benefit from such programs are usually quite different from those that bear its costs. Sometimes the government responds by postponing or modifying the program, sometimes by compensating those that are bearing an inequitable share of the costs. By using familiar economic concepts, the analyst can more effectively choose between the two approaches. Applying those concepts to the case of highway construction in California, we conclude that in this instance cash compensation is clearly superior to postponement as the policy of choice.     

Cost-sharing — A necessary component for successful technology transfer

The general objective of this paper is to propose the establishment of a federal cost-sharing policy for reducing risk in transferring technology from the R&D stage to commercialization. Minimization of this risk barrier is expected to encourage diverse groups to participate in technology transfer. Section II focuses on specific barriers that impede technology transfer efforts and it presents policy options to minimize identified barriers. Section III introduces objectives of cost-sharing experiments from which cost-sharing policies can be formulated. In addition, we also identify specific cost-sharing participation criteria and success variables for the policy.     

From status to delinquent offenses: Escalation?

An important issue in juvenile justice today is whether the juvenile court should maintain or abandon its present legal jurisdiction over status offenders. Arguments in favor of retaining such jurisdiction are often based on the relatively untested assumption of career “escalation”—the idea that juvenile misbehaviors, if left untreated, will increase in seriousness with age from status offenses to more serious forms of delinquency. However, our analysis of self-reported surveys from a national panel of boys indicates that patterns of juvenile misbehaviors are more likely to be stable or constant over time than to increase in seriousness. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

A note on taking account of the automatic death penalty jurors

The California Supreme Court'sHovey opinion identified a separate group of “automatic death penalty” (ADP) persons whose exclusion had been overlooked in previous studies of death qualification. Using data unavailable at the timeHovey was decided, this brief article estimates the effect of excluding this group on the attitudinal skewing and conviction-proneness of death-qualified jurors. It concludes that the impact of excluding the ADPs is negligible.