scholarly journals Deterrence Theory in Paraguay: An Exploratory Study

Author(s):  
Andreas Schneider

This research paper contributes to the literature of deterrence theory in general, and in particular with respect to white-collar crime, offering valuable inside by using a unique data set of fraud and violation of trust incidents for Paraguay. Descriptive evidence show a clear and continuous misallocation of funds and human capital, and therefore providing less efficient services for the public. Regression analysis suggests that clearance rate exerts a highly significant effect in deterring fraud but results are not clear for violation of trust incidents. Despite the limitations of available data, results confirm deterrence theory in Paraguay. However, to more than two-thirds of victims, not even the attempt was made to seek justice. As a side-result, it seems that a soft on crime strategy, induced from the former German penal code, has led to an increasing share of pre-trial diversion and therefore enhancing white-collar crimes like fraud and violation of trust due to impunity.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Andreas Schneider

This research paper contributes to the literature of deterrence theory in general, and in particular, with respect to white-collar crime, offering valuable insight by using a unique dataset of fraud and violation of trust incidents within the jurisdiction of Paraguay. Descriptive evidence shows a clear and continuous misallocation of funds and human capital, therefore providing less efficient services for the public. Regression analysis suggests that clearance rate exerts a highly significant effect in deterring fraud, but the results are not clear for violation of trust incidents. Despite the limitations of available data, results confirm the deterrence theory in Paraguay. However, for more than two-thirds of victims, not even an attempt was made to seek justice. As a side-result, it seems that a soft-on-crime strategy, induced from the former German penal code, has led to an increasing share of pre-trial diversion, therefore enhancing white-collar crimes like fraud and violation of trust, due to impunity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelika Reinelt-Broll

This study deals for the first time with evaluation questions in connection with the activities of the control units in accordance with § 197a SGB V, because the phenomenon of Healthcare-fraud as well as the demand for evidence-based crime prevention is increasingly becoming part of the public discourse. On the basis of a statistical analysis of activity reports from three reporting periods and a written questionnaire, the study shows the necessity of the activities of the control units regarding the fight against white-collar crime in the health sector and at the same time describes various factors increasing their effectiveness on an organisational and procedural level.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iryna Khovrenkov

As non-governmental providers of public goods, charities are funded by governments and also by individuals and foundations. How do foundation grants to charities affect private donations to these organizations? The standard economic theory on voluntary contributions to the public good hypothesizes that foundation giving will crowd out private donations. An alternative giving dynamic may arise whereby foundations act as complements to private donations because they can provide a signal of charity quality to individuals and thereby influence their decisions to give. This article offers a rigorous empirical analysis of the relationship between foundation and private donations by utilizing a unique data set on Canadian social welfare and community charities matched with their foundation donors. Empirical findings confirm that an additional dollar of foundation grants to charities crowds in private giving by three dollars on average, suggesting that private donors may look to foundation grants for information on charities to make informed giving decisions.


Author(s):  
Banks Miller ◽  
Brett Curry

United States Attorneys (USAs), the chief federal prosecutors in each judicial district, are key in determining how the federal government uses coercive force against its citizens. How much control do national political actors exert over the prosecutorial decisions of USAs? In this book, the authors investigate this question using a unique data set of federal criminal prosecutions between 1986 and 2015 that captures both decisions by USAs to file cases as well as the sentences that result. Utilizing intuitions from principal-agent theory, work on the career ambition of bureaucrats and politicians, and selected case studies, they develop and advance a set of hypotheses about control by the President and Congress. Harnessing variation across time, federal judicial districts, and five legal issue areas—immigration, narcotics, terrorism, weapons, and white-collar—Miller and Curry find that USAs are subject to considerable executive influence in their decision making, supporting findings about the increase of presidential power over the last three decades. In addition, they show that the ability of the President to appoint USAs to higher-level positions within the executive branch or to federal judgeships is an important mechanism of that control. This investigation sheds light on how the need to be responsive to popularly elected principals channels the enormous prosecutorial discretion of USAs. Clearly written and empirically sophisticated, the authors’ study has important cross-disciplinary implications and engages salient questions for students of politics, law, and criminal justice.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-379
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Culton ◽  
José A. Muñoz

We present a reflexive paper assignment calling for students to report on their own family and/or personal experiences in order to answer the question, “From where does the greatest harm arise?” We find that, through the process of answering this question and sharing findings in class, students’ conception of criminality is broadened. Institutional forms of deviance and white-collar crime come to be understood as the real commonplace sources of harm while street crime is seen to be less common than typically imagined. The book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice by Reiman and Leighton informs this assignment. The authors make the case that the criminal justice system presents to us a carnival mirror-like image of what causes the greatest harm to the society. The criminal justice system, through its policies and procedures, leads the public to conceive of only a narrow and distorted depiction of criminality. The typical crime is thought to be person to person, violent, and carried out by the typical criminal, who is assumed to be black, young, and urban. In opposition to this carnival mirror view, Reiman and Leighton explain that certain institutions cause immensely more harm than that caused by street criminality.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (01) ◽  
pp. 1450001
Author(s):  
Petter Gottschalk

The white-collar crime attorney is a lawyer who is competent in general legal principles and in the substantive and procedural aspects of the law related to upper-class financial crime. Based on a sample of 310 convicted white-collar criminals and their defence lawyers, this paper presents results from statistical analysis of relationships between crime characteristics and defence characteristics to predict lawyer fame. Statistical regression analysis was applied to the sample, where amount of crime money and years in prison represent crime characteristics, while number of client cases and lawyer income represent defence characteristics. About 91% of the variation in attorney fame is explained by these four independent variables.


1977 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Watkins

Recent literature on the control of white-collar crime has often glossed over the sociolegal effect of the attitudes held by persons charged with the responsibility of determining criminal guilt. In many cases, the factually guilty white-collar offender is not regarded by trial jurors as an offender. Contemporary legal sanctions are utilized only in those cases in which the public senses a real threat to its collective security. The crime problem is seen essentially as consisting of violent interpersonal offenses; the criminal law, predictably, has reacted to this form of deviance with its commonplace sanctions. On the other hand, crimes subsumed under the white-collar heading are often only lightly sanctioned even when brought to the attention of prosecuting authorities. The reason for this state of affairs is largely a unidimensional theory of crime causation- that crimequa crime is a problem peculiar to the lower socio-economic strata of society. White-collar offenders, coming as they generally do from the more affluent sector, are not perceived as "criminals" in the classic sense by the triers of fact. The "received opinion" of most lay jurors militates against their using criminal sanctions for the white-collar offender. They perceive crime as directly associated with a societal stratum that does not include those individuals who commit the majority of white-collar offenses. Hence juries are reluctant to convict white-collar criminals even when the law has been clearly violated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 26-36
Author(s):  
Hugh Grove ◽  
Maclyn Clouse ◽  
Tracy Xu

The major research question of this study is how boards of directors can monitor human resource reporting, especially with emerging reporting requirements from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for all domestic and foreign public companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. Boards can develop advising and monitoring practices to help their companies meet the SEC’s human capital reporting requirements, as shown by the following topics discussed and analyzed in this paper: criticisms of the modernization of Regulation S-K by using principle-based versus rules-based disclosures; a way forward on the modernization of Regulation S-K; sustainability accounting standards; human resource accounting; board responsibility for white-collar crime risk; and collegiality conundrums. We find that a possible way forward in modernizing human capital reporting would be to combine a rules-based approach with a principles-based approach. We recommend boards to closely follow the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and create opportunities to steer their companies towards a sustainable future. We also research the newly developed accounting standards to address human resource risks and promote sustainable human capital reporting. In addition, we identify the strategies for boards to monitor the risk of white-collar crime and highlight the balance between collegiality and effectiveness in the boardroom. Future research could use case studies and interviews of company boards to investigate how they have developed strategies and procedures to facilitate human resource management and reporting


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (12) ◽  
pp. 1667
Author(s):  
Peng Wang ◽  
Jinyi Li ◽  
Yinjie Ma ◽  
Zhiqiang Jiang

Charitable crowdfunding provides a new channel for people and families suffering from unforeseen events, such as accidents, severe illness, and so on, to seek help from the public. Thus, finding the key determinants which drive the fundraising process of crowdfunding campaigns is of great importance, especially for those suffering. With a unique data set containing 210,907 crowdfunding projects covering a period from October 2015 to June 2020, from a famous charitable crowdfunding platform, specifically Qingsong Chou, we will reveal how many online donations are due to endogeneity, referring to the positive feedback process of attracting more people to donate through broadcasting campaigns in social networks by donors. For this aim, we calibrate three different Hawkes processes to the event data of online donations for each crowdfunding campaign on each day, which allows us to estimate the branching ratio, a measure of endogeneity. It is found that the online fundraising process works in a sub-critical state and nearly 70–90% of the online donations are endogenous. Furthermore, even though the fundraising amount, number of donations, and number of donors decrease rapidly after the crowdfunding project is created, the measure of endogeneity remains stable during the entire lifetime of crowdfunding projects. Our results not only deepen our understanding of online fundraising dynamics but also provide a quantitative framework to disentangle the endogenous and exogenous dynamics in complex systems.


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