Restoring accountability in pretrial release: the Philadelphia pretrial release supervision experiments

As drug arrests and jail overcrowding added pressure to increase pretrial release in localities during the 1980s and 1990s, the need to manage a larger and higher-risk pretrial population of defendants awaiting adjudication in the community became a high priority for justice agencies. In the late 1990s Philadelphia officials sought to discover the ingredients of a successful supervision strategy through four interlinked field experiments to provide an empirical basis for a major reform of the pretrial release system. The results of the linked randomized experiments question common assumptions about “supervision,” its impact and effectiveness, about the underlying nature of the noncompliant defendant, and deterrence implications. The study emphasizes the importance of interpreting the findings in the context of implementation of the policy reform. Findings suggest that facilitative notification strategies wield little influence on defendant behavior and that deterrent aims are undermined by the system's failure to deliver consequences for defendant noncompliance during pretrial release. The most significant contribution of the article is its illustration of a major evidence-based policy reform undertaken by a major court system.     

Market Failure and Non-Standard Contracting: How the Ghost of Perfect Competition Still Haunts Antitrust

Modern antitrust policy has a ‘love hate’ relationshipwith non-standard contracts that can overcome market failure.On the one hand, courts have abandoned various per se rulesthat once condemned such agreements outright, concluding thatmany non-standard contracts may produce benefits that are cognizableunder the antitrust laws.¹ The prospect of such benefits, itis said, compels courts to analyze these agreements under theRule of Reason, under which the tribunal determines whethera given restraint enhances or destroys competition.² At thesame time, courts, scholars, and the enforcement agencies haveembraced methods of rule of reason analysis that are undulyhostile to such agreements.³ In particular, courts and othersare too quick to view such agreements and the market outcomesthey produce as manifestations of market power. This articleseeks to explain why these agreements are still the object ofundue hostility.     

A CRITIQUE OF PROFESSOR CHURCH'S REPORT ON THE IMPACT OF VERTICAL AND CONGLOMERATE MERGERS ON COMPETITION

We discuss Professor Jeffrey Church's report to the EuropeanCommission in 2004 on the effects of vertical restraints andmergers. Although thorough and accurate, the report could bemisinterpreted by practitioners, as it does not emphasize thatmarket power is only a necessary condition for harm to competition,and that most vertical mergers that present the possibilityof competitive harm also present economic efficiencies thatare intrinsic to the integration.     

Private sector shrinkage and the growth of industrialized economies: Reply

Further tests and thoughts on the OECD data lead me to conclude that, if anything, my 1986 paper underestimated the magnitude of the inverse relation between economic growth and government size. If one takes the nominal-based measure of government scale, as advised by Saunders, the significance levels, coefficient magnitudes and goodness of fits improve over what I found with my initial investigation. I would suggest that Saunders reconsider his reluctance to believe that the size of the public sector is unrelated to economic growth in OECD countries over this time period.One additional thought appears relevant to the current policy debate concerning budget deficits and economic performance within the major industrialized economies. The empirical work displayed here and in my 1986 paper suggests serious problems associated with the various proposals urging governments to raise taxes and/or ease fiscal policy. Elsewhere, I have suggested that available empirical evidence implies that plans to increase taxes as a way out of budget deficits are plans that carry the potential for raising government spending and possibly future deficits as well. Coupled with the evidence presented here, we should also recognize the potential of tax increases to raise the level of government participation in a country and, accordingly, exert inverse influences on its future economic performance as well. As suggested in my 1986 paper, the empirical evidence may suggest the following irony: While political participants may crave larger and larger non-market resource allocations, their future ability to satisfy that craving may very well be severely constrained by the satisfaction of that same appetite.     

Reviews

Recently, various authors have examined the relationship between growth in government size and total economic growth. In each case, the authors permitted only a monotonic relationship. This paper examines the issue of a non-linear relationship between growth in government and overall growth in the economy.Government contributes to total economic output in various ways. The provision of Pigovian public goods enhances the productivity of the private sector inputs increasing total output. However, the public decision-making process can result in an inefficient quantity of public goods. The likelihood of this outcome increases with the size of government. Further negative effects are created by the revenue raising and spending mechanisms of government, and the increasing diversion of resources into unproductive rent-seeking activities. The magnitude of these effects is likely to increase with the relative size of government.