What's Yours is Mine: Rent-Seeking and the Common Law

The paper develops a rent-seeking theory of the common law.The general finding is that the law's form depends on thecomparative advantage each group has in production versusappropriation generally, and appropriation via litigation inparticular. The model generates new interpretations ofdevelopments in United States common law, and is used both tosupplement and to criticize two dominant theories of such law,the efficiency theory associated with the law and economicsmovement and that generated by critical legal studiesscholars.     

Performance Measurement in U.S. Counties: Capacity for Reform

This study examines the capacity of U.S. counties to undertake performance measurement. Based on a national survey of counties with populations over 50,000, the authors address the following questions: To what extent do counties implement performance measurement? Which capacities must be present for different levels of implementation and success? What can counties do to increase their capacity for performance measurement? And, what is the effect of county structure and functions on the use of performance measurement? This study finds that the success of performance measurement is greatly affected by counties' underlying organizational capacities.     

Explaining Dosage Diffusion During Hot Spot Patrols: An Application of Optimal Foraging Theory to Police Officer Behavior

Drawing from the concepts of optimal foraging theory, this paper presents and tests the assumptions of a foraging theory of police behavior during hot spots patrols. The theory explains why, over time, officers involved in hot spots policing interventions would leave the hot spots they are assigned to police and begin working within other locations. We test what factors influence the amounts of activity that officers undertake outside of their assigned hot spots and at nearby streets using data gathered as part of the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment. Officers performed more activity outside of their beats as the experiment progressed. Several theoretically relevant variables predict the level of activity that officers perform outside their beats, including the size of the target area and the amounts of crime occurring within and outside of the target area. “Dosage diffusion” might be one reason why hot spot interventions have diminishing effects over time. From an optimal foraging theory perspective, hot spots requiring police officers to constrain their actions to pre-defined areas can be perceived as counter-intuitive by the officers, especially over extended periods of time. The results of this study support the suggestion that hot spots patrols should be short-term and randomly rotated across hot spots.     

A mountain or a molehill: is the illicit trade in cigarettes undermining tobacco control policy in South Africa?

This study estimates the size of the market for illicit cigarettes in South Africa between 1997 and 2007 in order to consider the impact of the illicit trade in cigarettes on the effectiveness of tobacco control policies. Estimates of the illicit market are made using data on smoking prevalence and simulations of smoking intensity. The paper shows that the size of the illicit market to have grown substantially from 1997 until peaking in 2000 between 9.4% and 11.5% of the total market. The most recent estimate for 2007 suggests that the illicit market occupied between 7.0% and 11.2% of the total market. These estimates are significantly lower than the anecdotal claims of the tobacco industry. Although the scale of the illicit market is significant it has not undermined tobacco control policy. Consumption in the total market, including both the illicit and legal market, has declined in size consistently. At the same time, tax revenue from higher excise taxes has offset the tax losses as a result of illicit trade.     

Conceptualizing and Measuring Ethnic Politics: An Institutional Complement to Demographic, Behavioral, and Cognitive Approaches

The influence of ??ethnic politics?? has been demonstrated in a range of empirical studies of economic growth, violence, and public goods provision. While others have raised concerns about the measurement of ethnic variables in these works, we seek to situate such discussions within a more thoroughgoing conceptual analysis. Specifically, we argue that four conceptual approaches??demographic, cognitive, behavioral, and institutional??have been used to develop theories in which the mechanism that relates causes to outcomes is ethnic political competition. Within this literature, we believe that institutional approaches have been relatively under-appreciated, and we attempt to address that imbalance. We begin by critically reviewing the three main ways in which ethnic variables have been specified and operationalized, delineating the assumptions and trade-offs underlying their use. Next, we describe an institutional approach to the study of ethnic politics, which focuses on the rules and procedures for differentiating ethnic categories. We propose some new indices based on this latter approach that might be developed and used in future research. Subsequently, we analyze the relationship between each of these approaches and patterns of ethnic political competition in a set of six country cases, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, as well as theoretical links between them.     

The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Nationalist Emulation during the COVID-19 Pandemic

As COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe, every government in the world has been forced to enact policies to slow the spread of the virus. While leaders often claim responses are based on the best available advice from scientists and public health experts, recent policy diffusion research suggests that countries are emulating the COVID-19 policies of their neighbors instead of responding to domestic conditions. Political and geographic considerations play a role in determining which countries imitate one another, but even among countries that are politically or geographically distant, nationalist regimes seem to favor certain approaches towards the pandemic. We investigate why this is the case by examining whether countries that embrace a nationalist ideology are more likely to emulate the COVID-19 policies of similarly nationalist regimes. We demonstrate that, even after controlling for domestic circumstances and linguistic, trade, geographic, and political connections, nationalist countries are emulating each other’s responses. These results are robust and shed light not only on new mechanisms of policy diffusion but also on the growing international cooperation of nationalist regimes and leaders.