A Behavioral Approach to Compliance: OSHA Enforcement's Impact on Workplace Accidents

This study test for effects of OSHA enforcement, using data on injuries and OSHA inspections for 6,842 manufacturing plants between 1979 and 1985. We use measures of general deterrence (expected inspections at plants like this one) and specific deterrence (actual inspections at this plant). Both measures of deterrence are found to affect accidents, with a 10% increase in inspections with penalties predicted to reduce accidents by 2%. The existence of specific deterrence effects, the importance of lagged effects, the asymmetrical effects of probability and amount of penalty on accidents, and the tendency of injury rates to self-correct over a few years support a behavioral model of the firm's response to enforcement rather than the traditional expected penalty' model of deterrence theory.

Contractual Compliance and the Federal Income Tax System

The income tax system has become a critical foundation for modern democracies, providing the primary means of financing the expansion of rights and obligations. Thus, the tax system provides a critical research site for understanding not only compliance with tax obligations, but also for understanding the broader relationship between democratic citizens and their government. In this Essay, I will elaborate on the adaptive contractarian perspective and apply it to the obligation to pay personal income taxes—the financial foundation of modern governance. The goal of the forthcoming book from which this Essay is taken is to empirically test the relevance of this perspective for explaining both the main features of the tax system and citizens’ compliance with tax obligations. Additionally, we (the book’s authors) will consider the implications of this perspective for the design of tax enforcement systems and policies. We hypothesize that citizens obey tax laws to the extent that other citizens and governmental institutions meet their related obligations, and that the coercive institutions of governance, in turn, are compelled to respect citizens’ rights

Enforcement Policy and Corporate Misconduct: The Changing Perspective of Deterrence Theory

Scholz offers a comment on Stephen Calkins\u27 article entitled Corporate Compliance and the Antitrust Agencies\u27 Bi-Modal Penalties. Scholz discusses deterrence theory and how the perspective on it changes

Enforcement Policy and Corporate Misconduct: The Changing Perspective of Deterrence Theory

Scholz offers a comment on Stephen Calkins\u27 article entitled Corporate Compliance and the Antitrust Agencies\u27 Bi-Modal Penalties. Scholz discusses deterrence theory and how the perspective on it changes

QUIT-for-TAT and the Endogenous Structure of Cooperation in Voluntary Dilemmas

The ability to select and reject partners creates a powerful means of supporting cooperation when a common set of actors faces repeated possibilities for playing the prisoner’s dilemmas with each other, a common situation that we refer to as a voluntary dilemma. The cooperative quit-for-tat (QFT) strategy that maintains all relationships with mutually cooperative partners but quits any relationship after a defection can maintain cooperation in voluntary dilemmas by joining together and excluding nasty and exploitative strategies. We develop the implications of the QFT model for the dynamics and structure of mutual cooperation, and test these implications in an experimental voluntary dilemma. The results confirm that the simple QFT model accounts for observed dynamics and structure of cooperative relationships, and that high-scoring subjects follow strategies that resemble QFT. We discuss the relative importance of niceness, forgiveness, and optimistic search in accounting for the success of QFT strategies, and note that the observed clustering of cooperators in this experimental setting is an artifact rather than a necessary support for cooperation

Social Capital in Coordination Experiments: Risk, Trust and Position

Social capital theory is exemplary in attempting to integrate both individual and institutional perspectives in the study of governance, but interactions between the individual and institutional components remain underexplored and unspecified in many situations. We extend the theory from its focal attention on prisoners dilemma games to an important and understudied class of collective action problems of critical concern for governance— coordination tasks ranging from simple matching games to more complex tasks involving conflict (battle of the sexes) and assurance problems (stag hunt). Laboratory experiments provide a means of observing the impact of institutional influences (bridging and bonding network capital), individual predispositions (trust and risk aversion), and their interaction on the ability to coordinate in these settings. The results confirm that neither individual nor institutional components alone can explain coordination, and that interactions between these components must be understood in terms of the specific task context being studied

Self-organizing policy networks: Risk, partner selection, and cooperation in estuaries

Policy actors seek network contacts to improve individual payoffs in the institutional collective action dilemmas endemic to fragmented policy arenas. The risk hypothesis argues that actors seek bridging relationships (well-connected, popular partners that maximize their access to information) when cooperation involves low risks, but seek bonding relationships (transitive, reciprocal relationships that maximize credibility) when risks of defection increase. We test this hypothesis in newly developing policy arenas expected to favor relationships that resolve low-risk dilemmas. A stochastic actor-based model for network evolution estimated with survey data from 1999 and 2001 in 10 U.S. estuaries finds that actors do tend to select popular actors as partners, which presumably creates a centralized bridging structure capable of efficient information transmission for coordinating policies even without any government mandate. Actors also seek reciprocal bonding relationships supportive of small joint projects and quickly learn whether or not to trust their partners.Fil: Berardo, Alfredo Ramiro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba; Argentina. University of Arizona; Estados UnidosFil: Scholz, John T.. Florida State University; Estados Unido

Policy Networks and Institutional Collective Action: A Research Agenda

Policy fragmentation in the American federalist system leads to inefficiencies as decisions by one authority impose positive and negative externalities on other authorities and their constituencies. We focus on the role of policy networks in shaping coordinated decisions that enhance the joint outcomes among governmental authorities. We advance two competing perspectives relating networks to collective action, one emphasizing the role of tightly-clustered strong-tie relationships capable of enhancing the credibility of commitments among network members, and the other emphasizing the role of extensive, weak-tie relationships linking diverse stakeholders in enhancing the shared information required to coordinate collective decisions. Our previous projects established the importance of local policy networks in enhancing compliance with federal regulations and developing coordinated policy agreements in local watersheds. The research provides initial evidence that extensive weak-tie networks play the most critical role in establishing joint projects, at least among specialized authorities managing an estuary\u27s natural resources. Our research agenda focuses on two critical settings, one emphasizing horizontal fragmentation (the joint provision of local services by municipalities), and the other emphasizing vertical fragmentation (the development of joint projects among federal, state, and local resource management agencies). In each setting, we will develop relevant formal models about the capabilities of different network structures and test them using an array of archival and survey data

The Solar Neighborhood XXV: Discovery of New Proper Motion Stars with 0.40 "/yr > mu > 0.18 "/yr between Declinations -47 degrees and 00 degrees

We present 2817 new southern proper motion systems with 0.40 "/yr > mu > 0.18 "/yr and declination between -47 degrees and 00 degrees. This is a continuation of the SuperCOSMOS-RECONS (SCR) proper motion searches of the southern sky. We use the same photometric relations as previous searches to provide distance estimates based on the assumption that the objects are single main sequence stars. We find 79 new red dwarf systems predicted to be within 25 pc, including a few new components of previously known systems. Two systems - SCR 1731-2452 at 9.5 pc and SCR 1746-3214 at 9.9 pc - are anticipated to be within 10 pc. We also find 23 new white dwarf candidates with distance estimates of 15-66 pc, as well as 360 new red subdwarf candidates. With this search, we complete the SCR sweep of the southern sky for stars with mu > 0.18 "/yr and R_59F < 16.5, resulting in a total of 5042 objects in 4724 previously unreported proper motion systems. Here we provide selected comprehensive lists from our SCR proper motion search to date, including 152 red dwarf systems estimated to be within 25 pc (nine within 10 pc), 46 white dwarfs (ten within 25 pc), and 598 subdwarf candidates. The results of this search suggest that there are more nearby systems to be found at fainter magnitudes and lower proper motion limits than those probed so far.Comment: 47 pages, 16 of text. 7 figure