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"Miceli, Thomas J"
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Counting offenders’ gains? Economic and moral considerations in the determination of criminality
The question of whether or not offenders’ gains should be counted in social welfare began with Stigler’s original critique of the Becker model, but that debate has been carried out solely within the context of law enforcement while taking the content of law as given. This paper extends the discussion to the question of what acts should be made criminal. It does this by viewing the Becker model of crime through the lens of the Coase–Calabresi–Melamed framework for assigning and protecting legal entitlements in conflicting-use situations. The analysis shows that the economic model cannot uniquely determine criminality, even when some allowance is made for a divergence between private and social values, provided that sanctions are optimally set. The content of law must therefore be imposed exogenously based on moral or other considerations.
Journal Article
Law Enforcement in a Federal System
This paper explores law enforcement in a federal system to address the reality that the level of deterrence often results from decision making at different levels of the system. In this setting, the presence of interregional externalities in the form of crime diversion induces socially excessive law enforcement incentives at the local level. We show that the adverse repercussions of uncoordinated enforcement decisions at the local level may be ameliorated by the strategic choice of the sanction at the central level. A nonmaximal sanction may be optimal, even though a maximal sanction would be optimal when the central level chooses all law enforcement variables. This conclusion shows that optimal law enforcement in a federal system must take account of the strategic interdependencies of relevant actors. We also discuss whether other arrangements of decision-making powers may be associated with higher levels of welfare.
Journal Article
On the Impossibility of a Purely Objective Economic Theory of Crime
This essay argues that a purely objective economic theory of crime (i.e., one devoid of moral or ethical judgments) is impossible. The basis for this claim is the reciprocal nature of causation in externality settings as first pointed out by Coase (1960), which renders the definition of harm indeterminate. At most, economic theory can prescribe an efficient pricing scheme once the direction of causation, and hence the nature of harm, has been defined. The essay concludes by discussing the implications of this idea for civil disobedience, cancel-culture, and victimless crimes.
Journal Article
A Note on Externalities and Revenue Sharing in Sports Leagues
Revenue sharing is a pervasive policy in professional sports leagues. While it is usually justified as promoting competitive balance, previous work has shown that it actually worsens balance in models where equilibrium outcomes are determined by contest success functions and when the league’s goal is to maximize aggregate revenue. This paper offers an alternative justification for revenue sharing in such settings—namely, to balance two offsetting externalities: the “rent-seeking externality” and the “spillover externality.” The first reflects the “race” to be first, and the second captures the value fans attach to overall league quality.
Journal Article
Trading in Information
This paper studies the problem of trading in information in two seemingly unrelated settings: inventive activity; and blackmail. In the former, a discoverer of some new information wishes to profit from it but may be deterred because the act of disclosure effectively makes the information public. Thus, legal protection of the information in the form of a patent is usually needed to allow the inventive process to proceed. Blackmail also involves trading in information; but because the transaction is between two parties who already know its content—the discoverer, and someone who wishes to keep it hidden—the appropriability problem is absent. The paradox of blackmail is why the blackmailer prefers to sell the information to the informed party rather than to the uninformed party (who actually values it more); this latter transaction would be legal. The resolution of the paradox provides the link to patent law, because the latter transaction does involve the appropriability problem.
Journal Article
Crime as exchange: comparing alternative economic theories of criminal justice
This essay compares two alternative economic theories of crime, due to Becker (1968) and Adelstein (2017), which differ with respect to the purpose of punishment. Both models are based on the idea of rational offenders and punishments as prices, but they part company with respect to how the level of punishment is, or should be, determined. Whereas Becker’s approach is based on the normative goal of welfare maximization and optimal deterrence, Adelstein’s model emphasizes that the system actually pursues corrective justice in individual cases. This essay explicates these different perspectives and explores their implications for social welfare.
Journal Article
Assessing Kelo’s Legacy: Do Increased Taxes and New Jobs Justify Use of Eminent Domain?
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. New London (2005) justified the use of eminent domain for redevelopment takings based on the anticipated spillover benefits to the community in the form of increased taxes and new jobs. This paper asks whether this is a coherent economic rationale for allowing expropriation of residential land for private development. We show that, in the absence of a market distortion, the answer is generally no. However, when there is a pre-existing imperfection in the land and/or labor market, it is possible, though not guaranteed, that allowing eminent domain will increase social welfare. The reason, however, is not because of the increased tax revenue or employment per se, but rather because eminent domain increases industrial/commercial land use above the inefficiently low level that arises in the presence of the distortions. Thus, setting aside questions about fairness or holdouts, we show that whether using eminent domain for private takings can be justified on the basis of economic efficiency hinges on the existence of market distortions and the relative values of residential vs. industrial/commercial land in that particular market.
Journal Article
On proportionality of punishments and the economic theory of crime
Practitioners of the modern economic theory of crime acknowledge the influence of the eighteenth century writers Montesquieu, Beccaria, and Bentham, whose theories of crime and punishment clearly presaged the economic approach. An important value espoused by all of these writers is proportionality between punishments and crimes, both as an end in itself and as a means of achieving marginal deterrence. This essay asks how closely the concept of proportionality is reflected in the prescriptions of the economic theory. The answer turns out to depend both on how proportionality is defined and on the assumptions underlying the enforcement regime.
Journal Article
Religion, rulers, and conflict
We offer new data and a new analytical approach to examine the roots of today’s civil conflicts that lie deeply in religious and political history. Religion’s effect on today’s conflicts come not from contemporary fractionalization or polarization, but from the deep-rooted effects of historical fragmentation coupled with rulers who could manipulate divisions by favoring co-religionists. To test the resulting hypotheses, we use a new dataset that includes annual information regarding the religious and political histories of today’s societies since the year 1000. We run regression analysis at both country and ethnic group levels. The results show that the likelihood of contemporary new conflicts is higher in societies that historically experienced religious fragmentation with rulers who shared religion with one of the groups and could thus favor coreligionists over others. Economic inequality and political grievances served as channels of transmission.
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