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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Forensic Economics, Eric Zitzewitz
Forensic Economics, Eric Zitzewitz
Dartmouth Scholarship
A new meta-field of "forensic economics" has begun to emerge, uncovering evidence of hidden behavior in a variety of domains. Examples include teachers cheating on exams, road builders skimping on materials, violations of U.N. sanctions, unnecessary heart surgeries, and racial biases in employment decisions, traffic stops, auto retailing, and even sports judging. In each case, part of the contribution of economic analysis is in uncovering evidence of wrongdoing. Although research questions differ, forensic economic work shares commonalities in approaches and limitations. This article seeks to draw out the common threads, with the hope of stimulating further research across fields. (JEL …
The Divergence Of Legal Procedures, Aron Balas, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer
The Divergence Of Legal Procedures, Aron Balas, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer
Dartmouth Scholarship
Simeon Djankov et al. (2003) introduce a measure of the quality of contract enforcement -- the formalism of civil procedure -- for 109 countries as of 2000. For 40 of these countries, we compute procedural formalism every year since 1950. We find that large differences in procedural formalism between common and civil law countries existed in 1950 and widened by 2000. For this area of law, the findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that national legal systems are converging, and support the view that legal origins exert long lasting influence on legal rules. (JEL K41, O17)