Racial stereotypes and robbery

Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial disparities. African-Americans are more likely to be victims, arrestees and prisoners than are members of other demographic groups, and while black-on-white robberies are very common, white-on-black robberies are extremely rare. The disparities for robbery are also much greater than those for other crimes of acquisition. We develop a model of robbery that attempts to address these and other stylized facts. Robberies are typically interactions between strangers that involve a sequence of rapid decisions with severely limited information. Potential offenders must assess the likelihood of victim resistance, and victims must assess the likelihood that resistance will be met with violence. Racial disparities in the distribution of income can cause such probability assessments to be race-contingent, affecting crime rates as well as rates of resistance and violence. We argue that this model helps account for several empirical regularities that appear puzzling from the perspective of alternative theories of crime.     

Arena-based events and crime: an analysis of hourly robbery data

This article makes use of hourly crime counts to model the relationship between events that take place at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ and robberies, an arena that has caused local controversy regarding the costs and benefits of hosting such an entertainment venue. Results from the econometric model suggest that the NHL’s New Jersey Devils ice hockey games, concerts, and Disney-themed events are all associated with increases in robbery, while various other event categories such as the NBA basketball games played by the Nets and boxing, and mixed martial arts (MMA) matches are not associated with an increase. These findings support two complementary ecological theories of crime that focus on how events provide additional opportunities for crime by increasing the associated benefits while simultaneously decreasing the cost for economically motivated offenders to take advantage of.     

The firm in Illyria: Market syndicalism reconsidered

Domar has argued that multi-input egalitarian labor-managed firms (ELMFs) must respond perversely to changes in product prices and fixed costs in the short run if their production technologies are radially parallel. This hypothesis is examined and disproven. It is demonstrated that radially parallel isoquants guarantee neither the perversity of the employment nor of the output effect, and it is shown further that the output elasticity of ELMFs with respect to price need not be less than its capitalist twin. These demonstrations suggest that the Pareto inefficiencies of ELMFs need not be severe and may be relatively minor.     

Interstate migration in Mexico: variations on the Todaro theme

"This study of migration in Mexico is based upon a modified Todaro approach and utilizes census data in a simultaneous equations model of 13 variables. It is unique in several ways: (a) it introduces proxy variables for employment probability and cost of migration that have not heretofore been found in the literature, but for which data are often available; (b) it illustrates that in some important cases census data have advantages not available through surveys; and (c) it finds that in some sense land reform in Mexico may have operated perversely. Finally, the study opens a new avenue for the study of informal sector growth."     

Athletic contests and individual robberies: an analysis based on hourly crime data

Using hourly data on individual robberies, this article employs a novel approach to investigate the relationship between athletic contests and individual robberies in Memphis, Tennessee, a well-known entertainment destination, with its iconic Beale Street locale, in the US. Empirical results indicate that home basketball games hosted by the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and those hosted by the University of Memphis Tigers are associated with increases in individual robberies, while away games are not associated with such an increase. This finding is consistent with the hot spot theory of crime, as large numbers of individuals travel to the games, thus providing additional opportunities for crime.     

Import sensitive products and perverse tariff‐rate quota liberalization

Abstract This paper shows that a Tariff‐Rate‐Quota's (TRQ) minimum access expansion can perversely trigger domestic price increases. Often, TRQs have prohibitive over‐quota tariffs to mimic import quotas in providing minimum market access. In the WTO's Doha Round, it is likely that countries using TRQs will avoid aggressive tariff reductions if they increase the quota portion of TRQs. We show that when the import price lies between the unit cost of production and the price received by domestic upstream firms, an increase in import quota as a share of domestic production may cause an increase in the domestic retail price.     

Evaluating Mergers in the Australian Petroleum Industry

We study the effects of mergers in the Australian petroleum industry during 1980–1994. The effect on the profitability of both the merging and non–merging firms is estimated. There is robust evidence that mergers have been associated with a decrease in profitability for all firms. Thus, the results are not consistent with the view that mergers have acted primarily to increase market power or that they have acted primarily to increase efficiency. There is some support for the more complicated view that mergers have both increased market power and decreased efficiency, with the latter effect dominating.     

Loss of control: legislature changes and the state–local relationship

There are a variety of methods that state legislatures can use to pass legislation which relates to municipalities. This paper explores why, how and when states changed their constitutions from allowing special legislation for municipalities to requiring general laws which would apply to all municipalities. Historians have put forward several explanations for why special legislation was harder to maintain as the nineteenth century progressed. A new way of framing the story is presented here by considering how the passage of special legislation was maintained through a logroll; legislators formed a coalition to vote on each other’s local legislation. As the size of the legislature expanded and the composition of the legislature changed, it may have been harder for legislators to maintain a coalition in order to logroll each other’s proposed local legislation. The previous theories along with the new one presented here are empirically tested. Evidence suggests a link between the size of the state legislature and the probability of instituting general legislation for municipalities, indicating that one motivation for adopting general laws was the dissolution of a stable logroll.     

Income inequality and crime in the United States

This paper investigates the relationship between income inequality and crime. Results show that there is a strong and robust effect of relative income inequality on burglary. Effect on robbery is also strong and robust in most cases.     

Building society mergers and the size—efficiency relationship: a comment

This study uses the 1988 CPS Displaced Workers Surveyto analyse the effect of written advance notification of plant closings and relocations on the re-employment earnings of blue-collar and, for comparison purposes, white-collar workers in the United States. The results show that written notification given less than 60 days in advance of the layoffs did not have any significant effect on the re-employment earnings of either blue-collar or white-collar workers of either gender. However, the results show that dislocated male blue-collar workers who were given advance notification of 60 days or more before their layoffs had significantly higher re-employment earnings. This result is supportive of the federal plant closing legislation mandating 60-day advance notification to dislocated workers in the United States.     

The effects of gun control on crimes: a spatial interactive fixed effects approach

This paper examines the effect of right-to-carry laws on crimes. We relax the assumption that unobserved time effects have homogeneous impacts on states; therefore, states with right-to-carry laws may follow different time trends which might be stronger or weaker than those of other states including states with no right-to-carry laws. The heterogeneous time trends are modeled by a factor structure where time factors represent time-varying unobservables, and factor loadings account for their heterogeneous impacts across states. No assumption is imposed on the shape of the time trend. Crime statistics exhibit spatial dependence, and a state’s adoption of right-to-carry law may have external effects on its neighboring states. Using a dynamic spatial panel model with interactive effects, we find positive spatial spillovers in crime rates. Depending on a crime category, an average \(1\%\) reduction in crime rates in neighboring states can decrease crime rates by 0.069–0.287%, with property crimes exhibiting higher degrees of spatial dependence than violent crimes. We find that although the passage of right-to-carry laws has no significant effects on the overall violent or property crime rates, they lead to short-term increases in robbery and medium-term decreases in murder rates. The results are robust to the number of factors, a different sample ending point, and some alternative spatial weights matrices and model specifications.     

Exchange rates in the short run: Some further results

This note extends our earlier results [published in this Journal. Vol. 10 (1977)] on the dollar DM exchange rate to the 1977–78 period. The original equation estimated on 1971–76 data overpredicts the dollar value of the DM during most of 1978. Thus the rise of the DM in the second half of 1978 was consistent with the ‘fundamentals’ equation. We also show that a net foriegn liability position may destabilize the foreign exchange market and that this may have been empirically significant for the dollar DM rate in 1973–74.     

THE RESEARCH ASSESSMENT EXERCISE AND THE REFORM OF ACADEMIC TENURE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

In this article the reform of academic tenure is examined in the United Kingdom. We test the hypothesis that reforming tenure may have reduced performance in the universities. The years following the 1988 Education Reform Act provide an interesting natural experiment, as the broad effect of the legislation was to soften (though not to remove) tenure in universities in the United Kingdom. It is concluded that the act has not adversely affected efficiency as some writers have predicted it would.     

土地集中效应差异化假说 ——农业经济时代与工业化和市场经济时代土地集中效应比较

土地兼并和集中是中国历史上土地关系中最受关注的问题之一。传统观点认为：中国历史上土地高度集中；土地的兼并和集中是建立在阶级剥削和掠夺的基础之上。本文重新检视了中国历史上的土地集中问题，并在对农业经济时代与工业化和市场经济背景下土地集中效应进行比较分析的基础上，提出土地集中效应差异化假说，说明农业经济时代与工业化和市场经济背景下土地集中具有不同的经济和政治效应。本文旨在为推动我国改造小农经济、实现土地集中和规模化经营提供理论支持，从历史的高度认识和处理现阶段土地流转和集中过程中出现的问题。     

Alcohol consumption and alcohol advertising bans

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between alcohol advertising bans and alcohol consumption. Most prior studies have found no effect of advertising on total alcohol consumption. A simple economic model is provided which explains these prior results. The data set used in this study is a pooled time series of data from 20 countries over 26 years. The empirical model is a simultaneous equations system which treats both alcohol consumption and alcohol advertising bans as endogenous. The primary conclusions of this study are that alcohol advertising bans decrease alcohol consumption and that alcohol consumption has a positive effect on the legislation of advertising bans. The results indicate that an increase of one ban could reduce alcohol consumption by 5% to 8%. The alcohol price elasticity is estimated at about 0.2. The results suggest that recent exogenous decreases in alcohol consumption will decrease the probability of enactment of new bans and undermine the continuance of existing bans. Canada, Denmark, New Zealand and Finland have recently rescinded alcohol advertising bans. Alcohol consumption in these countries may increase or decrease at a slower rate than would have occurred had advertising bans remained in place.     

How Do Longer Parental Leaves Affect Women’s Workplace Tasks? Evidence from Germany

This study examines how the radical extension of the period of parental leave, from eighteen to thirty-six months, that occurred in Germany in 1992 affected the nature of tasks women performed in their workplaces. The results of the analysis – which used a difference-in-differences method – suggests that this reform had a significant impact on the type of tasks carried out at work by women in the former West Germany. The study finds that after the reform was introduced, the women affected by it performed roles involving significantly less creative and more codifiable tasks than they had done previously. This analysis adds a new dimension to the discussion of the impact of maternity leave legislation on labor market outcomes.     

What did China’s labor contract law do to its private manufacturing firms?

Well-intended employment protection legislation may have adverse consequences. This paper uses Chinese firm-level data to assess the impacts of China’s Labor Contract Law, effective on January 1, 2008. My results show that, relative to public firms, private firms as a whole were negatively affected in terms of firm-level year-to-year employment changes. The law had negligible effects on employment and wages in firms with high wages. At the same time, employment fell and wages rose in firms with low wages. Moreover, firms who did not train workers intensively to acquire firm-specific skills had more job turnover than firms who did. Finally, I study how labor demand responded to the law along the extensive margin. For regions that experienced abrupt declines in labor mobility, possibly due to stricter labor regulation enforcement following the enactment of the Labor Contract Law, firm exit rose significantly, suggesting large incidence of mass layoff.     

International aid and financial crises in donor countries

The recent global financial crisis placed new economic and fiscal pressures on donor countries that may have long-term effects on their ability and willingness to provide aid. Not only did donor-country incomes fall, but the cause of the drop — the banking and financial-sector crisis — may exacerbate the long-term effect on aid flows. This paper estimates how donor-country banking crises have affected aid flows in the past, using panel data from 24 donor countries between 1977 and 2010. We find that banking crises in donor countries are associated with a substantial additional fall in aid flows, beyond any income-related effects, at least in part because of the high fiscal costs of crisis and the debt hangover in the post-crisis periods. Aid flows from crisis-affected countries are estimated to fall by 28% or more (relative to the counterfactual) and to bottom out only about a decade after the banking crisis hits. In addition, our results confirm that donor-country incomes are robustly related to per-capita aid flows, with an elasticity of about 3. Findings are robust to estimation using either static or dynamic panel data methods to account for possible biases. Because many donor countries, which together provide two-thirds of aid, were hit hard by the global recession, this historical evidence indicates that aggregate aid could fall by a significant amount (again, relative to counterfactual) in the coming years. We also explore how crises affect different types of aid, such as social-sector and humanitarian aid, as well as whether strategic interaction among donors is likely to deepen or mitigate the fall in aid.     

Does Equal Pay Legislation Reduce Labour Market Inequality?

This paper considers a labour market model of monopsonistic competition with taste-based discrimination against minority workers to study the effect of equal pay legislation on labour market inequality. When the taste for discrimination is small or competition is weak, the policy removes job segregation and the wage gap completely. However, with a bigger taste for discrimination or stronger competition, equal pay legislation leads to more job segregation, and sometimes minority workers end up earning less than before. Profits of discriminating firms might increase, and discrimination can persist in the long run, although it would have disappeared without the policy.     

土地兼并的历史检视

当前学术界的主流观点为，土地兼并是建立在封建土地剥削和掠夺的基础上。他们把土地兼并看成是封建统治腐朽的集中表现，是生产力发展的桎梏，是农民起义爆发的根本原因。本文的论证表明，这些观点站不住脚，夸大了土地兼并的程度，也没有从根本上认识兼并的本质和历史作用。