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on Law and Economics |
| By: | Blanco, Magdalena; Cabrera, José María; Carozzi, Felipe; Cid, Alejandro |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of mandatory motorcycle helmet use laws on the severity and volume of road accidents in Uruguay by exploiting a change in the enforcement of the traffic law. Using a differences-in-differences design based on an unexpected change in policy, we report a sharp increase in helmet use and a 5 percentage point reduction in the incidence of serious or fatal motorcyclist accidents from a baseline of 11%. The benefits of helmet use are disproportionately borne by groups more likely to experience serious injuries such as males or young drivers. We find no evidence of other responses in terms of either the volume or type of accidents, suggesting motorcyclists' behaviour did not respond to differences in risk. We show that additional costs of enforcement for the relevant government agencies were negligible and estimate the health benefits of the policy. |
| Keywords: | law enforcement; safety and accidents; helmet use |
| JEL: | I12 I18 R41 H89 |
| Date: | 2022–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:114440&r=law |
| By: | Monica Deza (Center for Policy Research, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 426 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of community access to mental health and substance use treatment on police officer safety, which we proxy with on-duty assaults on officers. Police officers often serve as first-responders to people experiencing mental health and substance use crises, which can place police officers at risk. Combining agency-level data on police officer on-duty assaults and county-level data on the number of treatment centers that offer mental health and substance use care, we estimate two-way fixed-effects regressions and find that an additional four centers per county (the average annual increase observed in our data) leads to a 1.3% reduction per police agency in on-duty assaults against police officers. Established benefits of access to treatment for mental health and substance use appear to extend to the work environment of police officers. |
| Keywords: | law enforcement, healthcare, on-duty assaults, mental health disorders, substance use disorders |
| JEL: | I1 I11 I18 |
| Date: | 2023–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:max:cprwps:261&r=law |
| By: | Jain, Satish |
| Abstract: | This paper is concerned with the derivation of conditions for efficiency for liability rules for successive joint torts. In a successive joint tort, in the first instance the victim suffers harm on account of interaction with a tortfeasor, which subsequently is aggravated because of interaction with another tortfeasor. There can of course be no aggravation if there is no accident in the first instance. A liability rule for successive joint torts is a rule that determines (i) in case of first accident, the liability shares of the victim and the first injurer on the basis of the extents of negligence of the victim and the first injurer; and (ii) in case of second accident, the liability shares of the victim and the two injurers on the basis of the extents of negligence of the victim and the two injurers. It is shown in the paper that a liability rule for successive joint torts is efficient if the following condition is satisfied: if one of the victim and the first injurer is negligent and the other nonnegligent, then the entire accident loss resulting from interaction between the victim and the first injurer is to be borne by the negligent individual; and if one of the victim and the two injurers is negligent then no nonnegligent individual is to bear any part of the accident loss resulting from interaction between the victim and the second injurer. This condition has been termed in the paper as negligence liability for successive joint torts (NL-SJT). A subclass of the class of all liability rules for successive joint torts is that of simple liability rules for successive joint torts. A simple liability rule for successive joint torts apportions the accident losses solely on the basis of negligence or otherwise of individuals; the extents of negligence are not taken into account. It turns out that a simple liability rule for successive joint torts is efficient if and only if it satisfies NL-SJT. Whether NL-SJT is necessary for efficiency of any liability rule for successive joint torts remains an open question. |
| Keywords: | Liability Rules for Successive Joint Torts; Simple Liability Rules for Successive Joint Torts; Negligence Liability for Successive Joint Torts; Efficiency Conditions |
| JEL: | K13 |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:118440&r=law |
| By: | Goeschl, Timo; Haberl, Beatrix; Soldà, Alice |
| Abstract: | Punishment institutions for curtailing free-riding in social dilemmas rely on information about individuals’ behavior collected through monitoring. We contribute to the experimental study of cooperation-enhancing institutions by examining how cooperation and efficiency in a social dilemma change in response to varying how monitoring and punishment are jointly organized. Specifically, we evaluate - against a no-monitoring baseline - combinations of two imperfect monitoring regimes (cen-tralized vs. decentralized) and three punishment regimes (self- vs. peer- vs. del-egated punishment) in a repeated public goods game. As hypothesized, we find that delegated punishment outperforms other punishment regimes, irrespective of the monitoring regime, both in terms of cooperation and efficiency. Monitoring, both centralized and decentralized, cannot raise cooperation relative to the baseline unless accompanied by a credible punishment. When combined with a punishment institution, both monitoring regime outperforms the baseline. |
| Keywords: | compliance; monitoring; punishment; experiment |
| Date: | 2023–09–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:awi:wpaper:0737&r=law |
| By: | Fantazzini, Dean; Xiao, Yufeng |
| Abstract: | Detecting pump-and-dump schemes involving cryptoassets with high-frequency data is challenging due to imbalanced datasets and the early occurrence of unusual trading volumes. To address these issues, we propose constructing synthetic balanced datasets using resampling methods and flagging a pump-and-dump from the moment of public announcement up to 60 min beforehand. We validated our proposals using data from Pumpolymp and the CryptoCurrency eXchange Trading Library to identify 351 pump signals relative to the Binance crypto exchange in 2021 and 2022. We found that the most effective approach was using the original imbalanced dataset with pump-and-dumps flagged 60 min in advance, together with a random forest model with data segmented into 30-s chunks and regressors computed with a moving window of 1 h. Our analysis revealed that a better balance between sensitivity and specificity could be achieved by simply selecting an appropriate probability threshold, such as setting the threshold close to the observed prevalence in the original dataset. Resampling methods were useful in some cases, but threshold-independent measures were not affected. Moreover, detecting pump-and-dumps in real-time involves high-dimensional data, and the use of resampling methods to build synthetic datasets can be time-consuming, making them less practical. |
| Keywords: | pump-and-dump; crypto-assets; minority class; class imbalance; machine learning; random forests |
| JEL: | C14 C25 C35 C38 C51 C53 C58 G17 G32 K42 |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:118435&r=law |