The Philadelphia predictive policing experiment

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This place-based, randomized experiment explored the impact of different patrol strategies on violent and property crime in microscale predicted crime areas....     

Sequential trials and the English rule

The allocation of trial costs and the way a trial progresses are two important issues in civil procedure. The combination of these two elements has received relatively little attention in the law and economics literature. The prior literature has only compared unitary litigation (e.g. liability and damage issues are litigated, after which the court decides on both issues) under the American rule with sequential litigation (e.g. the parties first litigate the liability issue after which the court makes a decision, and then if still necessary the parties litigate the damages issue) under the American rule. In this article, I examine the influence of sequential litigation when the loser at trial pays all the litigation costs and compare the results with (a) the situation in which litigation is unitary and the loser pays all the litigation costs and (b) the situation in which litigation is sequential and each party bears her own costs. I focus on the incentive to sue, the incentive to settle (or to litigate) and on the settlement amount. Some interesting differences with the previous literature are discussed in detail.     

Walls of secrecy and silence

Research Summary Most analysts of the causes of the contemporary credit crunch have concluded that the supervising agencies failed in their duties. The same is true for studies of several major fraud scandals, including the Madoff affair and the Dutch construction fraud. The remedy seems immediately obvious: more and better regulation and supervision. However, this line of reasoning seems somewhat simplistic by ignoring the question of how illegal activities can remain hidden for many years from supervising agencies, victims, and bystanders. This research article argues that the problem also lies in the successful concealment of illegal activities by the perpetrators and in the presence of silence in their social environment. Policy Implications The cases analyzed in this article suggest that financial misconduct also could be controlled by breaking the conspiracies of silence. The strengthening of supervision is unlikely to be effective without simultaneous efforts to encourage people to speak out and to give them incentives to want to know and to tell the truth.     

Non-parametric approach to the study of farm efficiency in agriculture

This article examines the extent of resource-use efficiency under different types of tenure and different farm sizes in two types of villages — one having high incidence of irrigation facilities and High Yielding Varieties (HYV) technology in an area usually cropped twice the same plot of land every year and the other having no irrigational facilities except rain-water and non-HYV technology in a mono-cropping area because the estimates on the extent of inefficiencies could help to decide whether to improve or to develop new technology to raise productivity. On the basis of a field survey and applying the method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) the authors observe that all farms score high efficiency irrespective of the types of tenure and of farm sizes, in both the types of villages. This seems to suggest that the diffusion of new agricultural technology is not so important in improving the efficiency level of the farm.