Crime Control and Harassment of the Innocent

Crime control through law enforcement is generally considered to be a two-part process of appre­hending and incapacitating or rehabilitating the guilty, and deterring the innocent from crime by the threat of punishment. The analysis presented here shows that the protection of the innocent from harass­ment-detention, arrest, punishment, and other intrusions by the criminal justice system-is important in deterring crime. Specifically, the analysis shows that deterrence from crime is weakened and then lost for a rational individual who holds the majority attitude toward risk, if the levels of rightful punishment and wrongful harassment are increased, as in a war on crime, and the likelihoods of wrongful and rightful punishment are reasonably close. The analysis is employed to show how the perceived likelihood of harassment may be a contributing factor to the disproportionately high representation of minority groups in the U.S. prison system

Environmental turbulent mixing controls on air-water gas exchange in marine and aquatic systems

Air-water gas transfer influences CO2 and other climatically important trace gas fluxes on regional and global scales, yet the magnitude of the transfer is not well known. Widely used models of gas exchange rates are based on empirical relationships linked to wind speed, even though physical processes other than wind are known to play important roles. Here the first field investigations are described supporting a new mechanistic model based on surface water turbulence that predicts gas exchange for a range of aquatic and marine processes. Findings indicate that the gas transfer rate varies linearly with the turbulent dissipation rate to the equation image power in a range of systems with different types of forcing - in the coastal ocean, in a macro-tidal river estuary, in a large tidal freshwater river, and in a model (i.e., artificial) ocean. These results have important implications for understanding carbon cycling

ASPECTS OF TWO METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES OF QUANTITATIVE ECONOMIC HISTORY

Abstract not availabl

Probability Weighting and the Persistence of Disagreement among Constituents

This paper is a technical note that reports an interesting risk-related result relevant to the analysis of disagreements among constituents. The problem of interest here is the clash that often arises within a political constituency regarding the decision to act or not act in response to a problematic situation. The analysis presented here shows that the probability weighting function of prospect theory plays a fundamental role in the persistence of disagreements among constituents that involve policy decisions with large potential losses of low likelihood.

High volatility eliminates the disposition effect in a market crisis

The disposition effect is an effect whereby investors tend to sell winning stocks and tend to hold losing stocks. This inclination is detrimental for investment results. Dacey and Zielonka (2008) showed the impact of the probability of further stock price rise under low stock price volatility on the disposition effect. Specifically, they showed that under low volatility, in the case of a gain, the investor is more likely to sell the winner even if the probability of the further gain is high, whereas in the case of a loss, the investor is more likely to hold the loser even when the probability of a further gain is small. In this paper we examined the disposition effect under high volatility. The general conclusion is that under high volatility, in the case of a gain, the investor behaves in the same way as for low volatility, whereas in the case of a loss, the investor is less and less likely to hold the loser as volatility increases. Thus, in the case of a loss under high volatility, the investor acts contrary to the disposition effect. This result explains the panic selling of stocks during a market collapse

Crime Control and Harassment of the Innocent

Crime control through law enforcement is generally considered to be a two-part process of appre­hending and incapacitating or rehabilitating the guilty, and deterring the innocent from crime by the threat of punishment. The analysis presented here shows that the protection of the innocent from harass­ment-detention, arrest, punishment, and other intrusions by the criminal justice system-is important in deterring crime. Specifically, the analysis shows that deterrence from crime is weakened and then lost for a rational individual who holds the majority attitude toward risk, if the levels of rightful punishment and wrongful harassment are increased, as in a war on crime, and the likelihoods of wrongful and rightful punishment are reasonably close. The analysis is employed to show how the perceived likelihood of harassment may be a contributing factor to the disproportionately high representation of minority groups in the U.S. prison system