Size, Monitoring and Plea Rate: An Examination of United States Attorneys

A theoretical model relates case mix, staffing, and monitoring to the likelihood of a plea agreement. Analysis of federal drug trafficking cases in fiscal years 1993 through 1996 leads to the following conclusions: There are fewer pleas in districts that are understaffed and are facing more severe crimes. Further, there are fewer pleas in United States Attorney districts with many or with few prosecutors, and there are more pleas in United States Attorney districts with an average number of prosecutors. The explanation for the latter results is that prosecutors may take cases to trial to acquire human capital unless they are closely monitored. Estimation of the monitoring technology shows that it exhibits increasing returns to scale for small districts, and decreasing returns to scale for large districts. Given such a monitoring technology, the relationship between the number of prosecutors and the level of monitoring is consistent with an optimal allocation of resources between monitoring and prosecution.

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Does the Rights Hypothesis Apply to China?

Using firm-level data from a World Bank survey, this paper examines how legal development in China relates to various firm decisions. I find that a more active court system is associated with more investment, more adoption of technology, more innovation, and more complex transactions. Specifically, when a higher percentage of business disputes are resolved through the court system, firms tend to have higher investment rates, higher propensities to adopt new automated technology, and higher probabilities of developing new products. In addition, they tend to have more nonlocal sales. These findings are consistent with a sophisticated version of the rights hypothesis, in which the rule of law eventually replaces relation-based governance as a superior governance mechanism. I find two limitations of China’s legal system. The court system does a better job facilitating the growth of state-owned enterprises than of private firms, and it protects local firms better than nonlocal firms.

Does the Chinese version of Bayh-Dole Act promote university innovation?

The Chinese version of Bayh-Dole Act (BD for short) refers to the ownership reform policy for patents arising from government funding research grants. We collected the policies of 31 “985 project” universities from 1998 to 2015 to explore the impact of the Chinese BD. Empirical evidence suggested that patent applications, patent approvals, patent durations, patent citations, and profits from technology transfer of the universities adopting the BD policy had increased significantly. The BD policy encouraged more researchers to disclose and commercialize their inventions and to pursue global patent filing strategies. Compared with the BD policy, the incentive effect of subsidies, tenure promotion and cash bonuses were relatively limited

Do discretion criteria for patent administrative law enforcement encourage innovation among firms?

The management by administrative authorities of law violations represents one of the instruments for enforcing laws in China, the other way is lawsuit. The law allows administrative discretion to achieve efficiency but may lead to unfair law enforcement. Governments’ establishing patent administrative discretion criteria can deter unfair law enforcement by guiding administrators to determine administrative penalties. As such, a quasi-experimental approach testing the discretion criteria established by provincial patent administrative authorities was used in the current study to evaluate the impact of discretion criteria on law enforcement and innovation among firms. The empirical evidence shows that patent administrative discretion criteria increase the number of patent administrative law enforcement cases and encourage firms to apply for more patents, and this impact is larger for firms in industries where the new product market is broader, patent license fees are higher, patent rights easier to be infringed upon, and R&D duration is lengthier

Productivity Spillovers from FDI in the People's Republic of China: A Nuanced View

Using panel data from the Chinese Industrial Surveys of Medium-sized and Large Firms for 2000–2006, we show that the presence and the magnitude of technological spillovers from FDI in the People's Republic of China are affected by the source of FDI, by the ownership type of a firm in consideration, as well as by industrial and provincial characteristics. Private firms are more likely to benefit from horizontal spillovers than other domestic firms, but are less likely to benefit from vertical ones. Presence of state-owned firms in the industry impedes technological spillovers in a way that is consistent with diversion of linkages from private to state-owned firms. Finally, horizontal spillovers are larger in industries that are more technologically sophisticated

Horizontal and Vertical Conflict: Experimental Evidence

We experimentally explore the connections between horizontal conflict of interests (citizens have heterogeneous preferences over collective decisions) and vertical conflict of interests (agents in charge of implementing collective decisions earn political rents). We identify two sets of models that incorporate both types of conflicts: electoral models with endogenous rents, and common‐agency models. We adapt these models to a laboratory setting and test their main theoretical predictions. In both cases we find support for the proposition that more intense horizontal conflict leads to higher rents. Our findings have important implications. At the macro level, they help explaining the persistence of corruption in very unequal societies. At the micro level, our findings suggest that anti‐corruption programs should allocate more resources (e.g., inspectors and auditors) to areas with intense horizontal conflicts