Law & Economics at sixty:Mapping the field with bibliometric and machine learning tools

As the year 2020 marks the 60th anniversary of the landmark paper in the Law &amp; Economics (L&amp;E) field by Ronald Coase—The Problem of Social Cost—we provide a systematic bibliometric analysis of the development of this field over the years. We look at the output and input side of knowledge production in the field of L&amp;E. The former consists of the volume of production and thematic coverage of the field. The latter—input—looks at the producers of knowledge, the institutional and country affiliations of authors, and the intellectual structure of the field. Thus, the “who”, the “where” knowledge is produced as is also that of on “whose” shoulders the field stands. We demonstrate that Law &amp; Economics shifted from more theory driven work to empirical and evidence-based contributions. Likewise, we show that the Law &amp; Economics field tends to be dominated by authors affiliated with economics departments, and crucially; however, more impactful research seems to be produced by inter-disciplinary cooperation. The L&amp;E field further resembles the economics domain in terms of co-authorship patterns, number of citations and lengths of papers. Finally, we look at diversity in the field of L&amp;E and show, for instance, that the share of female scholars has been steadily growing for the last two decades.</p

Can Imprisonment Be Cheaper? The Law and Economics of Private Prisons

Custody is the most expensive method of punishment in the western world, as compared to other alternatives. Although expensive, prison is an indispensible instrument to deal with judgment proof or dangerous offenders. Hence, by using the law and economics approach, this paper explores prison privatization as an instrument for less expensive incarceration. This method has the potential to reduce the prison costs without hampering its quality. However, a restructuring of the current contracts is needed to achieve this purpose. The attention given to the topic of private prisons by the law and economics scholars, especially in the European context, is limited and this paper attempts to fill this gap. The present paper applies arguments from the bureaucracy and political science literature to explain the inefficiencies of public prisons. Subsequently, the potential problems of private prisons are presented through the principle-agent model and solutions are offered

Any-Where Any-Time: Ambiguity and the Perceived Probability of Apprehension

Enforcement is a costly endeavor. Thus, governments ought to be innovative in designing less costly policies, yet, effective in preventing crime. To this end, this paper suggests using insights from behavioral law and economics. Empirical evidence demonstrates that police have an important effect in deterring crime. However, increasing the number of policemen is a costly policy. Therefore, this paper explores policy changes, which exploit offender’s ambiguity aversion in order to reduce crime without increasing the police force. Namely, empirical evidence suggests that criminals are better deterred by ambiguous detection. Thus, this paper analyzes the ways to randomize the apprehension strategies to meet this end. Furthermore, it provides new evidence, based on a survey carried out for the purpose of this paper, that potential violators are largely not aware of policy changes. Inasmuch as the information regarding the intensified uncertainty is essential to its success, this paper discusses the possibility to increase criminals’ awareness through the “availability heuristic.

Income-Dependent Punitive Damages

The Article unfolds in six parts. Part I outlines the development of the law governing punitive damages. Part II analyzes the possible rationales for this unique “middle-ground” doctrine, focusing on deterrence and retribution. Part III considers whether the defendant’s wealth should be considered in assessing punitive damages in light of their underlying goals. Part IV demonstrates how the defendant’s wealth can be integrated into the calculation. It extracts the foundations from European criminal justice systems and adapts the model to American civil law. Part V defends the proposed model from the relevant theoretical perspectives. Lastly, Part VI discusses potential hurdles to the implementation of the new model—constitutional constraints, statutory caps on punitive damages, and the need for special procedural tools

Public perception of terrorism attacks:A conjoint experiment

In democratic societies, governments cannot act in isolation from public opinion. This is especially true regarding terrorism, where public perception is the instrument targeted by terrorists to achieve their political goals. Nevertheless, governments must also be able to resist public pressure and preserve individual rights. All this suggests that researching public perception of terrorist attacks is crucial. We make an important contribution in this direction by measuring the importance the public assigns to various attributes of terrorist attacks. Using novel methodology (conjoint experiment) and survey data from the UK and The Netherlands (N = 6,315), we find that people are concerned with attacks by immigrants (in the Netherlands), and by individuals acting as part of a terror cell, and with jihadist motivation. Furthermore, past experience with specific terrorist tactics drive preference to address such attacks more than others. In both countries people strongly focus on the severity of attacks, and under-weigh probabilities. The terror attack in the Netherlands in 2019 provided an opportunity to examine perception right after an actual attack. Also there we have found that people’s concerns are driven by experience with specific attacks. A better understanding of terrorism perception can inform policymakers about the gap between optimal strategies to combat terrorism and the expectations of the public.</p

Day fines: asymmetric information and the secondary enforcement system

The most common pecuniary sanction, i.e. fixed-fines, places an emphasis on the severity of the crime. This fine has the problem of being either too high for poorer offenders to pay or too low for the richer offenders to be deterred. Day-fines, on the other hand, systematically account for the financial situation of the offender as well as for the severity of his offense. Consequently, it imposes equivalent burden of punishment on offenders who committed similar crimes, regardless of their wealth. However, a problem of asymmetric information is raised. Accurate financial information is essential for the efficiency of day-fines, yet its collection is costly. Day-fines receive increasing attention from policy-makers around the world. Nonetheless, it is under-researched in the law and economics literature. Therefore, this article is the first to formally analyze the problem of asymmetric information in the context of day-fines and to develop an optimal secondary enforcement system that would incentivize criminals to provide accurate information regarding their wealth