For fraud,look under ‘serious and organized crime’

ABSTRACT

The UK government’s response to fraud cannot be disentangled from its broader ‘serious and organized crime’ (SOC) strategy. In order to explore whether fraud should—in public policy, criminal justice and law enforcement terms—be seen primarily as an SOC issue, there is a need to consider questions about whether or not ‘SOC’ is a sensible object of policy-making in the first place. Several arguments in favour of an SOC policy are identified in the paper. However, the notion of an overarching SOC policy is problematic for three reasons. First, SOC is a fundamental misrepresentation of reality, which does not correspond to a real social problem. Second, SOC policy can limit the development of more problem-specific crime strategies, Third, the ‘SOC’ label can negatively transform how social problems are perceived over the long term. If fraud is to be better understood and dealt with, it may therefore be necessary to extract it from its current inclusion within wider SOC strategy.     

预算公开与廉洁政府关系的实证研究——基于OBI与CPI的相关性检测

预算公开与廉洁政府建设是学术界关注的热门话题,两者之间的关系更是其中的重点。2006、2008、2010与2012四个年度共同涉及的44个国家的预算公开指数与清廉指数的相关性检测表明,预算公开指数与清廉指数之间呈正相关关系,且基本属于高度相关,部分国家数据的不对称只是虚假背离。高度契合与虚假背离的背后起决定性作用的是成熟的民主政治,因此,预算公开推动廉洁政府建设需要以成熟的民主政治为前提和基石。     

Taming Airbnb: Toward guiding principles for local regulation of urban vacation rentals based on empirical results from five US cities

Urban vacation rentals, a phenomenon that has grown explosively very recently, bring benefits to cities but also impose quality of life and housing market impacts on neighborhoods. As a consequence, cities are beginning to grapple with creating regulatory regimes for managing this new land use and its encroachments on residential areas. This article uses webscraped data from Airbnb, the industry leader, to analyze the geographical patterns and concentrations of these impacts in five US cities: Austin, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. It uses the findings to put forth four general principles for cities seeking to manage impacts imposed by Airbnb and its competitors. These are that webscraping is an imperfect but relatively cheap and effective means of gathering locally specific data; that “spiky” usage patterns dictate a microgeographic approach to regulation; that meaningful regulation necessitates dedicated enforcement, likely paid for with permit fees; and that it is desirable to distinguish between “mom-and-pop” hosts and those operating at a commercial scale.     

Direct Democracy and Local Public Finances under Cooperative Federalism

In this paper, we exploit the introduction of the right of local initiatives in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 in order to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. Our identification strategy combines difference‐in‐differences and regression discontinuity methods: we compare municipal expenditure and revenue between pre‐ and post‐reform periods at population thresholds where the signatures needed to launch initiatives and minimum quorum requirements decrease discontinuously (difference‐in‐discontinuities design). The results suggest that stronger direct democratic institutions lead to an expansion of local government size.     

Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis of the Local Coupon Preferences of Millennials

This article explores the local coupon preferences of the 18–29-year old market. Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to determine Millennials’ local coupon needs and preferences. From this data, three need-based segments were identified and discussed. The findings indicate that while overall, millennials are resistant to receiving coupons for local businesses through their cell phones, there is one segment that is receptive to this method of coupon delivery method.     

Local Powers of Optimal One‐sample and Multi‐sample Tests for the Concentration of Fisher‐von Mises‐Langevin Distributions

One‐sample and multi‐sample tests on the concentration parameter of Fisher‐von Mises‐Langevin distributions on (hyper‐)spheres have been well studied in the literature. However, only little is known about their behaviour under local alternatives, which is due to complications inherent to the curved nature of the parameter space. The aim of the present paper therefore consists in filling that gap by having recourse to the Le Cam methodology, which has recently been adapted from the linear to the spherical setup. We obtain explicit expressions of the powers for the most efficient one‐ and multi‐sample tests. As a nice by‐product, we are also able to write down the powers (against local Fisher‐von Mises‐Langevin alternatives) of the celebrated Rayleigh test of uniformity. A Monte Carlo simulation study confirms our theoretical findings and shows the empirical powers of the above‐mentioned procedures.     

乡土正当性与法律正当性在林权纠纷中的博弈——基于桂南两县一区的实地调查

通过背景梳析,在对林权纠纷中地方政府、国有林场、农户的调查后发现乡土正当性和法律正当性在当地林权纠纷中存在冲突,通过分析得出当前的林权纠纷问题具有普遍性和复杂性的基本特征;从制度经济学的产权角度和农户增收角度来看,农户的土地产权应得到维护。     

以政府职能转变推动收入分配改革

收入和财富分配的不平等一直是中国改革发展中的重要问题。针对中国经济的特点,可以从政府改革的角度来研究如何更好地进行收入分配改革。地方政府主导推动地方经济的做法对收入不平等的扩大起了重要作用,加快政府职能转换,是使收入分配改革真正落到实处的破局之处,也是实现收入分配合理化可行的第一步。要改变地方政府的经济职能,降低它直接参与基础设施的程度,改革地方土地财政,建立垂直管理机构,以分散它的一部分经济管理职能,为收入分配改革打开空间。     

加强政府回应渠道的建设与完善促进服务型政府建设

服务型政府作为公共管理研究的一个重点领域,其定义和评判标准学术界目前并没有完全统一,但对于服务型政府的根本目标和内容的认识是基本一致的。从政府的服务角度看,对政府服务效果评价的主体应该是接受政府服务的广大群众,而群众的评价又与政府面对公众诉求时回应的态度、效率及采用的方法和取得的结果有直接关系。所以提高政府的回应质量直接关系到群众对政府的满意度,本文将从加强政府回应渠道的建设与完善角度出发,探讨服务型政府建设问题。     

Does higher government debt link to higher social expenditure? New method,new evidence

Scholars believe that higher social expenditures are usually linked with higher government debts, whereas higher debts reduce social expenditures. However, it is reasonable to speculate that higher government debt may contribute to higher social spending, while fiscal deficits occur during a recession, which commonly creates greater demand for social expenditure. For a deeper investigation, this paper revisits the dynamic relationship between social spending and public debts in the time-frequency domain, using the novel wavelet-coherency analysis as well as the phase-difference technique to derive the co-moved and causal relationships between social spending and public debts in 13 OECD countries. The evidence identifies a dynamic relationship between variables. While higher social expenditures increase government debts, the shocks from government debts to social expenditures are conversely uncertain. We discover that higher government debt does reduce social expenditures, but it may be linked to higher social spending. The robustness of partial coherency and phase-difference discovers the role of a political party in the decision over social welfare programmes in the sample countries.