LAW ENFORCEMENT AND WRONGFUL ARRESTS WITH ENDOGENOUSLY (IN)COMPETENT OFFICERS

Economic intuition suggests that enforcement errors incentivize crimes, therefore officers must be penalized for committing such errors. Legal scholars argue that if penalties for errors are severe, officers may become timid while policing (thereby encouraging crime). We evaluate these arguments in a model where officers invest in competence. Competence increases the officer's ability to identify criminals. Low sanctions for errors encourages bold policing by officers but may still raise the equilibrium level of crime because it also discourages investments in competence. Granting immunity to only competent officers (“qualified immunity”) reduces both errors and crimes when competence is observable. (JEL K4, K42, L5)     

RACIAL COMPOSITION OF NEIGHBORHOOD AND EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING

The paper briefly reviews the leading theories of female crime causation that surfaced in the twentieth century and proposes an alternative, theoretical orientation using a Marxian approach. This explanation uses existing theoretical and empirical studies to account for: 1) the means by which women are defined as criminal, 2) the class relationship between female criminals and the general population of women, and 3) the system by which control over both the population of female criminals and the general population of women is legitimized. The paper also examines the relationship between the victimization of women and the opportunity structure as class‐based.     

TEAM RACIAL COMPOSITION AND SPORTS ATTENDANCE

The premise that the racial composition of professional sports teams is a significant factor in explaining paid attendance variability is tested in this article. A model of the general determinants of sports attendance, including the percentage of black players on each team, is developed and applied to longitudinal samples of National Basketball Association teams from 1969 to 1983. This pooled cross-sectional panel model is analyzed within a generalized least-squares framework. While the empirical results are generally consistent with previous estimates for spectator attendance models, team racial composition has no discernible impact upon the level of attendance. Several interaction hypotheses are considered, but when these more complex propositions are evaluated, player race still has no noticeable effect upon attendance. Some implications of these results for race relations and for the structure of salary determination within professional basketball are discussed.     

SCHOOL RACIAL COMPOSITION AND BIRACIAL ADOLESCENTS' SCHOOL ATTACHMENT

Despite extensive research on multiracial youth in recent years, to date, no empirical studies have analyzed how racial context may affect biracial adolescents' sense of belonging in a social institution beyond families. In this study, we examine how the racial makeup of the student body affects self-identified biracial adolescents' school attachment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that the proportions of white or black students in school significantly affect the school attachment of Hispanic/black, Asian/black, and American Indian/black biracial adolescents, but school racial composition in general has little influence on biracial adolescents with a partial-white identification (i.e., black/white, Hispanic/white, Asian/white, and American Indian/white). Our analyses also show that on average, students of most biracial groups display lower school attachment than their corresponding monoracial groups, but the differences from the monoracial groups with the lower school attachment are generally small. We discuss the implications of our findings for biracial adolescents' perceived racial boundaries and contemporary American race relations.     

ORGANIZED CRIME OR INDIVIDUAL CRIME? ENDOGENOUS SIZE OF A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION AND THE OPTIMAL LAW ENFORCEMENT

This article develops a simple but general criminal decision framework in which individual crime and organized crime are coexisting alternatives to a potential offender. It enables us to endogenize the size of a criminal organization and explore interactive relationships among sizes of criminal organization, the crime rate, and the government's law enforcement strategies. We show that the method adopted to allocate the criminal organization's payoffs and the extra benefit provided by the criminal organization play crucial roles in an individual's decision to commit a crime and the way in which he or she commits that crime. The two factors also jointly determine the market structure for crime and the optimal law enforcement strategy to be adopted by a government. (JEL K4 )     

RESIDENTIAL STABILITY, NEIGHBORHOOD RACIAL COMPOSITION, AND THE SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT OF NEIGHBORHOOD PROBLEMS AMONG OLDER ADULTS

This study investigates the effects of neighborhood racial composition and residential stability—as measured by the percentage of individuals who have lived in the same location for the past five years—on perceived neighborhood problems. Among a sample of older black and white adults, findings indicate that the patterns are contingent upon residents' race. For whites who reside in neighborhoods with a low percentage of black residents, greater residential stability is associated with fewer perceived neighborhood problems net of individual- and neighborhood-level disadvantage. For blacks, greater residential stability is associated with fewer neighborhood problems, but the percentage of black residents is associated with more neighborhood problems. In both cases, individual- and neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantages contribute to those patterns. These findings have implications for theories about the personal and social effects of residential stability and neighborhood racial composition, as well as race differences in the links between neighborhood context and the subjective assessment of neighborhood problems.     

THE COMPOSITION AND CONSTRUCTION OF MONETARY AGGREGATES

An economic monetary aggregate is composed from a set of monetary goods that are at least weakly separable from other goods in the optimizing agent's utility function. We construct such an aggregate using a Divisia index number. We demonstrate that through the middle of the 1980s forecasts of the inflation rate based on our economic monetary aggregate are superior to forecasts based on the simple sum monetary aggregates M1 or M2.     

THE LAW OF GENIUS AND HOME RUNS REFUTED

In a lively, provocative article, DeVany claims inter alia that the size distribution of home runs follows a continuous "power law" distribution which is nested in a larger class of "stable" statistical distributions characterized by an infinite variance. He uses this putative fact about the size distribution of home runs to argue that concern about the use of steroids to enhance home run ability is necessarily misplaced. In this article, we show that the initial claim is false and argue that the subsequent claim about the potential importance of steroid use does not follow from the first. We also show that the method used to establish that the size distribution of home runs is characterized by an infinite variance is unreliable and will find evidence "consistent" with infinite variance in all but the most trivial of data sets generated by processes with finite variance. Despite a large and growing literature that spans several fields and uses methods and arguments similar to DeVany's, we argue that mere inspection of the unconditional distribution of some human phenomenon is unlikely to yield much insight. ( JEL C16, L83)     

QUANTIFYING THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF ANTICARTEL ENFORCEMENT

This paper presents a rare attempt to quantify the deterrent effect of anticartel policy. It develops a conceptual framework, which establishes the sort of information necessary for such quantification. This is then illustrated and calibrated by drawing upon existing literatures and using evidence from legal cartels to approximate what would be observed absent policy. Measuring impact by the proportion of all potential harm that is deterred, our best estimate is two‐thirds and, even on conservative assumptions, at least half of all harms (or seven times the detected harm) is deterred. (JEL H11, K21, L44)     

ON THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE'S SERVICE AND ENFORCEMENT

Built on the seminal work of Graetz et al. (1986), this study considers a model of tax compliance in which the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) services as well as audits taxpayers as in the real world. Taxpayers are uncertain about whether their incomes are eligible for deduction/exemption, and may seek advice from the taxpayer service provided by the IRS to mitigate the uncertainty. We show: (1) while the society's preferred quality of taxpayer service is likely to be sufficiently high, the IRS's preferred quality of taxpayer service is only at an intermediate level; and (2) the conflict between the society and the IRS tends to be intensified as the cost of tax audits becomes lower. Evidence in support of our results is addressed. We also extend our model to addressing the issue of corruption in tax administration and to considering a dynamic model. (JEL D82, H26, K42)     

WHITE ENROLLMENT IN NONPUBLIC SCHOOLS, PUBLIC SCHOOL RACIAL COMPOSITION, AND STUDENT PERFORMANCE

This research note presents preliminary research into the relationship between the racial composition of public schools in school districts and the percentages of white students in nonpublic schools in those districts. Specifically, we ask two questions: Is the enrollment of whites in non‐public schools associated with minority predominance in public schools? Is there an association between the enrollment of whites outside of the public school system and the academic performance of students in the public school system? Using two‐ and three‐level hierarchical linear models, we find that school districts that have more whites in nonpublic schools tend to contain public schools with larger percentages of minority students. Further, at both the school and individual levels, achievement test scores tend to be lower in districts in which white students tend to be enrolled outside of the public school system. In addition, the achievement gap between white and minority students tends to be greater in districts with relatively more students in nonpublic schools. These findings are consistent with the argument that the withdrawal of white students from the public school system is negatively related to academic achievement because it tends to concentrate minority students in public schools.     

INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND THE COMPOSITION OF LABOR MARKET TURNOVER

The composition of labor market turnover is shown to influence patterns of international trade. Job and worker turnover have opposing marginal effects on industry export intensity, highlighting the importance of relative turnover shares on either side of the labor market, as opposed to total volumes of labor mobility, in shaping economic outcomes. Industries with relatively greater shares of worker turnover export more of total production, and those with higher job turnover export less. Furthermore, relatively high job turnover hinders industry adjustment following trade liberalization. These predictions receive support for U.S. manufacturing industries using turnover data in the Quarterly Workforce Indicators available from the U.S. Census Bureau. (JEL F16)     

DISAGGREGATING THE EFFECTS OF RACIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ON EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EXECUTION RATES

This article examines how class inequality may have influenced the historical use of executions in the United States, both within the South and outside of the South. Specifically, this article asks whether executions acted as a mechanism to maintain an exploitative class system in the entire United States, just as lynching maintained a racial caste system in the South. Much of the literature on the historical determinants of macrolevel execution rates has examined these disparities in terms of racial inequality. This study demonstrates that racial inequality alone cannot account for the high number of executions that typified the early twentieth century United States and contends that it is important to expand our understanding of the effects of class inequality on both historical and contemporary trends in executions.     

COMMON LAW, STATUTE LAW, AND THE THEORY OF LEGISLATIVE CHOICE: AN INQUIRY INTO THE GOAL OF THE SHERMAN ACT

Although the Sherman Antitrust Act is more than a century old, debate continues over its goals. In contrast to what many have argued, I contend that the Act's main goal is to maximize economic efficiency, rather than the welfare of consumers. The Sherman Act is a modest extension of the common law, which the "Law and Economics" literature indicates moves towards economic efficiency. Further, unlike the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, Sherman Act decisions are made by courts, not a regulatory agency. Thus, the theory of legislature choice also implies that the goal of the Act is to maximize economic efficiency.     

RANKING LAW JOURNALS AND THE LIMITS OF JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS

Journal rankings published by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are widely used to assess research quality, which influences important decisions by academic departments, universities, and countries in the allocation of research funds. We study refereed law journal rankings by JCR and Washington and Lee Law Library (W&L). JCR's rankings are uncorrelated with W&L's. The differences appear to be attributable to underrepresentation of law journals in JCR's database. We illustrate the effects of database bias on rankings through case studies of three elite journals, the Journal of Law and Economics, Supreme Court Review, and the American Law and Economics Review. (JEL C18, C81, Y10)     

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION AND THE INDUSTRIAL COMPOSITION OF MULTINATIONAL ACTIVITY

In a North‐South model with endogenous foreign direct investment (FDI), we examine the impact of Southern intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on the mode and industrial composition of international technology transfer. A novel feature of the model is that, due to technological reasons, industries differ with respect to their susceptibility to imitation. In equilibrium, licensing occurs in industries where the risk of imitation is low and FDI where it is of intermediate magnitude. Stronger IPRs in the South (1) alter the industrial composition of multinational activity toward licensing at the expense of FDI; (2) reduce local imitation; and (3) increase licensing and, to a lesser extent, FDI. (JEL F10, O34)     

THE COMPOSITION OF GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE: ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND PREFERENCES

This paper examines the question of why the composition of government expenditure differs among democratic countries and to what extent it may be explained by differences in economic conditions or preferences. A simple overlapping generations model, which allows for a range of relevant factors, is constructed to examine the division of expenditure on public goods and a transfer payment under majority voting. The model yields a closed‐form solution for the majority choice of the expenditure ratio. An empirical examination suggests that income inequalities play a minor role while different preferences for public goods reflecting cultural differences across countries may play an important role in accounting for the substantial variations in expenditure patterns. (JEL D72, H41, H53, H11)     

THE IMPACT OF SCHOOL RACIAL COMPOSITIONS ON NEIGHBORHOOD RACIAL COMPOSITIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SCHOOL REDISTRICTING

I use data surrounding public school redistricting to study how school racial compositions affect neighborhood racial compositions. This redistricting followed from the end of court‐ordered busing for racial desegregation, significantly changing the racial composition of the assigned school for many neighborhoods. Over a 5‐year period, the impact of an increase in the percent black of the assigned elementary school on the percent black of the neighborhood was positive. The effects increased over time, consistent with a simple model of short‐run neighborhood racial dynamics. These results have implications for potential effects of school racial desegregation policy changes on neighborhood racial compositions. (JEL H75, I28, R23)