Journal of Law Economics & Organization最新文献

{"title":"Organization of the State: Home Assignment and Bureaucrat Performance","authors":"Guo Xu, Marianne Bertrand, R. Burgess","doi":"10.1093/JLEO/EWAB022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JLEO/EWAB022","url":null,"abstract":"How to allocate personnel is a central question in the organization of the state. We link survey data on the performance of 1,472 elite civil servants in India to their personnel records between 1975-2005 to study how home allocations affect their performance and careers. Using exogenous variation in home assignment generated by an allocation rule, we find that bureaucrats assigned to their home states are perceived to be less effective and more likely to be suspended. These negative effects are driven by states with higher levels of corruption and cohorts with greater numbers of home state officers. ∗First draft: December 2017. This paper has benefited from comments of seminar participants at the NBER Organizational Economics Meeting, the University of Houston, Northwestern Kellogg, Uppsala, Columbia GSB, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics Summer Forum, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Chicago Harris, the BPP-GEM workshop, the Stanford Quality of Governance workshop and the ABCDE World Bank conference. We thank Oriana Bandiera, Tim Besley, Michael Callen, Arunish Chawla, Ernesto Dal Bo, Esther Duflo, Miguel Espinosa, Fred Finan, Olle Folke, Guido Friebel, Saad Gulzar, Rema Hanna, Julien Labonne, Anandi Mani, Jan Pierskalla, Andrea Prat, Johanne Rickne, John de Figueiredo, Daniel Rogger for their valuable comments. Finally, we particularly thank a group of senior IAS officers for sharing their institutional knowledge, and Lakshmi Iyer and Anandi Mani for sharing their data on empanelment outcomes. Fraser Clark, Anton Heil, Rebecca Rose, Jinling Yang and Jiemin Xu provided excellent research assistance. A previous version of this paper has been circulated under the title “Social Proximity and Bureaucrat Performance: Evidence from India.” All errors remain our own. †Guo Xu (corresponding author): guo.xu@berkeley.edu; Marianne Bertrand: marianne.bertrand@chicagobooth.edu; Robin Burgess: r.burgess@lse.ac.uk.","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79819916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Behavioral Effects of (Unenforceable) Contracts†","authors":"Evan Starr, J. Prescott, Norman D. Bishara","doi":"10.1093/JLEO/EWAA018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JLEO/EWAA018","url":null,"abstract":"We study the relationship between employment noncompetition agreements and employee mobility patterns using novel data from the 2014 Noncompete Survey Project. Specifically, we examine how noncompetes relate to the duration and nature of employee mobility, and we leverage our detailed individual-level survey data to identify and explore the precise mechanisms underlying the relationships we observe. We find that individuals with noncompetes appear to exhibit materially longer tenures and are more likely to depart for new employers that do not “compete” with their prior employers. To account for these patterns, we investigate the role noncompetes may play at each stage of the mobility “process”: job search, employer recruitment, offer receipt, negotiation, offer acceptance, etc. We present evidence that employees bound by noncompetes substitute job search activity and receptivity to recruitment in the direction of noncompetitors and that noncompetes are a factor in the choice to turn down approximately 40 percent of the offers employees receive from competitors.","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72529002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unintended Consequences of Products Liability: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Market*","authors":"Eric A. Helland, D. Lakdawalla, A. Malani, S. Seabury","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa017","url":null,"abstract":"In a complex economy, production is vertical and crosses jurisdictional lines. Goods are often produced by an upstream national or global firm and improved or distributed by local firms downstream. In this context, heightened products liability may have unintended consequences on product sales and consumer safety. Conventional wisdom holds that an increase in tort liability on the upstream firm will cause that firm to (weakly) increase investment in safety or disclosure. However, this may fail in the real-world, where upstream firms operate in many jurisdictions, so that the actions of a single jurisdiction may not be significant enough to influence upstream firm behavior. Even worse, if liability is shared between upstream and downstream firms, higher upstream liability may mechanically decrease liability of the downstream distributor and encourage more reckless behavior by the downstream firm. In this manner, higher upstream liability may perversely increase the sales of a risky good. We demonstrate this phenomenon in the context of the pharmaceutical market. We show that higher products liability on upstream pharmaceutical manufacturers reduces the liability faced by downstream doctors, who respond by prescribing more drugs than before. Eric Helland Claremont McKenna College Department of Economics Claremont, CA 91711 eric.helland@claremontmckenna.edu Darius Lakdawalla Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics University of Southern California 3335 S. Figueroa St, Unit A Los Angeles, CA 90089-7273 and NBER dlakdawa@healthpolicy.usc.edu Anup Malani University of Chicago Law School 1111 E. 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER amalani@uchicago.edu Seth A. Seabury Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics University of Southern California 3335 S. Figueroa St, Unit A Los Angeles, CA 90089-7273 seabury@usc.edu A common feature of modern, complex economies is vertical production that crosses jurisdictional lines. Technological development and specialization is associated with vertical chains of production, where upstream firms supply inputs for downstream firms who add value and sell to consumers. Moreover, firms at all levels have grown in scale and scope, and they now often serve many markets across a range of different jurisdictions. This geographic expansion is perhaps even more pronounced for upstream firms, because downstream firms, such as distributors and retailers, tend to be local or at least retain a well-defined local presence. To remain relevant and effective, tort rules and other legal structures need to account for the interactions among firms in a vertical chain of production. To some extent, tort law has successfully incorporated the reality of vertical production. In the 1800s, a doctrine called “privity” prevented individuals from suing upstream firms for injuries from products of downstream firms. Cases such as MacPherson v. Buick Motor Company (N.Y. 1916) and Smith v. Peerless Glass Co (N.Y. 1932) abandoned the do","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83070957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Voter Turnout and City Performance: Evidence from Italian Municipalities","authors":"A. Prete, F. Revelli","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using data on mayoral elections in large Italian cities during the 2000s, we investigate whether and how voter turnout affects city performance across a number of dimensions. To address the issue of voter turnout endogeneity and identify the transmission mechanism, we exploit exogenous variation in participation rates in mayoral elections due to anticipated shocks (concurrence of local and national elections) and unanticipated shocks (bad weather on the day of the election) to the cost of voting. The results consistently point to a negative impact of voter turnout rates on indicators of urban environmental performance, life quality, and administrative efficiency. Interestingly, though, we find that only anticipated shocks to turnout affect the quality of elected mayors measured on a number of competence dimensions, compatibly with the hypothesis of a selection mechanism whereby parties choose candidates to maximize their chances of winning the elections based on their expectations on voter turnout rates (JEL D72, H72, C26).","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91298665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is a Corruption Crackdown Really Good for the Economy? Firm-Level Evidence from China","authors":"Zhiyuan Chen, Xin Jin, Xu Xu","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa014","url":null,"abstract":"We study the impact of anticorruption efforts on firm performance, exploiting an unanticipated corruption crackdown in China’s Heilongjiang province in 2004. We compare firms in the affected regions with those in other inland regions before and after the crackdown. Our main finding is an overall negative impact of the crackdown on firm productivity and entry rates. Furthermore, these negative impacts are mainly experienced by private and foreign firms, while state-owned firms are mostly unaffected. We present evidence concerning two potential explanations for our findings. First, the corruption crackdown may have limited bribery opportunities that helped private firms operate. Second, the corruption crackdown may have interfered with personal connections between private firms and government officials to a greater extent than institutional connections between state-owned firms and the government. Overall, our findings suggest that corruption crackdowns may not restore efficiency in the economy, but instead lead to worse economic outcomes, at least in the short run (JEL L2, M1, O1).","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85629401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Product Safety and Harm-Mitigation Incentives When Mitigation Lowers Consumption Benefits","authors":"F. Baumann, Tim Friehe","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 To reduce the expected harm its product causes to consumers, a firm can invest in a product’s safety before sale or mitigate harm after sale in the event product risks materialize. After-sale harm mitigation interferes with consumers’ product use and reduces consumption benefits. We describe a firm’s incentives for safety investments and harm mitigation as a function of the level of the firm’s liability. Whereas post-sale mitigation incentives are scaled up by liability, pre-sale product safety is a U-shaped function of liability, making the two harm reduction instruments substitutes at low levels of liability and complements at high levels. To induce efficient harm mitigation, liability must be less than full. Further reducing the level of liability improves product safety at the cost of the firm’s profits. (JEL K13, D42).","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74214916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Risk Preferences and Incentives for Evidence Acquisition and Disclosure","authors":"Erin C. Giffin, E. Lillethun","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Civil disputes feature parties with biased incentives acquiring evidence with costly effort. Evidence may then be revealed at trial or concealed to persuade a judge or jury. Using a persuasion game, we examine how a litigant’s risk preferences influence evidence acquisition incentives. We find that high risk aversion depresses equilibrium evidence acquisition. We then study the problem of designing legal rules to balance good decision making against the costs of acquisition. We characterize the optimal design, which differs from equilibrium decision rules. Notably, for very risk-averse litigants, the design is “over-incentivized” with stronger rewards and punishments than in equilibrium. We find similar results for various common legal rules, including admissibility of evidence and maximum awards. These results have implications for how rules could differentiate between high risk aversion types (e.g., individuals) and low risk aversion types (e.g., corporations) to improve evidence acquisition efficiency.","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74466678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reducing Unjust Convictions: Plea Bargaining, Trial, and Evidence Disclosure","authors":"A. Daughety, Jennifer F. Reinganum","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We develop a dynamic model of a criminal case, from arrest through plea bargaining and (possibly) trial, allowing for the potential discovery of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors (who choose whether to disclose it) and defendants. We consider three regimes: (1) no disclosure required; (2) disclosure only required before trial; and (3) early disclosure required from arrest onward. These regimes have complex distributional consequences for the defendants. We find that innocent defendants ex ante prefer early disclosure whereas guilty defendants prefer disclosure only before trial. We also explore some of the social costs attributable to the regimes (JEL K4, D82, D73).","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87322312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conservation Agreements: Relational Contracts with Endogenous Monitoring","authors":"Heidi Gjertsen, Theodore Groves, David A. Miller, E. Niesten, D. Squires, Joel Watson","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa006","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Gjertsen, Heidi; Groves, Theodore; Miller, David A; Niesten, Eduard; Squires, Dale; Watson, Joel | Abstract: Abstract This article examines the structure and performance of conservation agreements, which are relational contracts used across the world to protect natural resources. Key elements of these agreements are (1) they are ongoing arrangements between a local community and an outside party, typically a nongovernmental organization (NGO); (2) they feature payments in exchange for conservation services; (3) the prospects for success depend on the NGO engaging in costly monitoring to detect whether the community is foregoing short-term gains to protect the resource; (4) lacking a strong external enforcement system, they rely on self-enforcement; and (5) the parties have the opportunity to renegotiate at any time. A repeated-game model is developed and utilized to organize an evaluation of real conservation agreements, using three case studies as representative examples. (JEL D74, D86, Q20, Q56)","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81582171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Worker Trust in Management and Delegation in Organizations","authors":"Kieron J. Meagher, A. Wait","doi":"10.1093/jleo/ewaa008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewaa008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using a unique employee–establishment survey, we find a causal relationship between an individual employee’s trust of management and their decision-making rights (delegation). We utilize both fixed effects (FE) and instrumental variables to control for unobserved factors: establishment-level FE control for management quality, practices, culture, and other characteristics; our instruments of inherited trust in management, and trust of equivalent workers in a different but similar country address the possible endogeneity of employee trust. Across all specifications, we find that delegation to a worker is more likely if that employee trusts management. In our preferred model, which includes establishment FE and accounts for endogeneity, we find a 1 standard deviation (SD) increase in employee trust increases delegation by approximately 0.6 of 1 SD. Our results are robust to the inclusion of worker preferences for individualism (which favors delegation), incentives/bonuses, and alternative measures of decision authority. (JEL D23, L22, L23).","PeriodicalId":47987,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law Economics & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82451762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}