Dismantling Policing for Profit: How to Build on Missouri's Post-Ferguson Court Reforms

This Note argues that legal reforms enacted after the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri uprising are insufficient to address the problem of using courts as revenue generators and the related problem of predatory policing. Reforms to date have merely capped how much money towns can raise from their courts; they have not fixed the perverse incentive problem, which allows towns like Ferguson to extract wealth from vulnerable, low-income residents through the court system. This Note argues that towns should be required to remit the money their courts raise to a state education fund, which puts legal separation between the entity collecting the money and the beneficiary of those funds. This Note considers two provisions of the Missouri Constitution, one which could be read as requiring such a reform, and another which could be read as prohibiting such a reform. This Note compares Missouri’s constitutional provisions to a similar North Carolina constitutional provision and concludes that the Missouri Constitution provides ample support for reformers to advocate for this Note’s proposed reform. Finally, this Note offers a roadmap for the steps needed to build political and legal support for the reform.

Exit Decision of Venture Capital Based on Linear Contract in Continuous Time: IPO or M&A

Based on the assumption that the long-term value of a venture capital satisfies the algebraic Brownian motion, we develop a continuous-time exit model of venture capital under different exit modes, namely, initial public offering (IPO) and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The employee incentive problem is analyzed jointly with the exit decision of the firm in terms of the exit timing and the exit mode. Further, the problem of capital exit is considered from two perspectives, namely, optimal venture capital and social welfare maximization, and the differences between these exit decisions are compared. Our model predicts that the timing of an IPO, the purpose of which is to maximize the utility of the capitalists, lags behind the exit timing, whose purpose is to maximize social welfare. Using a numerical analysis, this paper also proves that increasing the production efficiency, lowering the interest rates, and improving risk management can make the exit decision of venture capitalists converge with that of maximizing social welfare.

Eliminating Trust Issues in Islamic Interbank Monetary System by Blockchain Technology

In the literature, it is argued that there is an agency or incentive problem in the Mudarabah Interbank Instrument (MII), an instrument where the depositor is the rabbul-mal (capital provider or investor) while the counterparty is the mudarib or entrepreneur. It is to the receiving bank's advantage to ‘declare' a lower profit rate. To solve this problem, the Malaysian Central Bank revised the rules by setting a minimum benchmark rate for the MII. This practice is quite similar to the fixed interest rate in conventional financial system which may trigger several Shariah issues. In this chapter, the authors argue that the blockchain technology is a better way to address the issue and propose and how it overcomes the issue in the Islamic interbank money market. As implication of the study, Islamic banks can start using it as a testing process for the future businesses, and in accordance with the analyzing test results, they can implement the system for every occasion.

The Production of Information in an Online World

News production requires investment, and competitors’ ability to appropriate a story may reduce a media’s incentives to provide original content. Yet, there is little legal protection of intellectual property rights in online news production, which raises the issue of the extent of copying online and the incentives to provide original content. In this article, we build a unique dataset combining all the online content produced by French news media during the year 2013 with new micro audience data. We develop a topic detection algorithm that identifies each news event, trace the timeline of each story, and study news propagation. We provide new evidence on online news production. First, we document high reactivity of online media: one quarter of the news stories are reproduced online in under 4 min. We show that this is accompanied by substantial copying, both at the extensive and at the intensive margins, which may constitute a severe threat to the commercial viability of the news media. Next, we estimate the returns to originality in online news production. Using article-level variations and media-level daily audience combined with article-level social media statistics, we find that original content producers tend to receive more viewers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.

On bank’s risk incentives under deposit insurance system

This paper refers to bank’s risk incentive problem which is one of the factors behind its risky behavior toward investing in projects. Using the relevant distributions of depositors’ bank balances, we study the risk incentive influence. As a result, the bank’s risk incentive is shown to be classified regarding depositors and bank’s shareholders who increase its capital, indicating the former being positive value and the latter negative. In this study, we use perpetual American put option and perpetual down and out call option. Thus, we examine changes in the influence of these incentives, showing several numerical examples.

Why Some Persistent Problems Persist

Recent work on counter-insurgency, client states, foreign aid, and proxy wars uses a principal–agent framework to study the principal’s ability to induce an agent to exert effort on the principal’s behalf. This work broadly emphasizes the moral hazard problem and the actors’ limited commitment power. The latter is usually addressed through the logic of repeated games in which reneging on an agreement triggers future punishment. This study analyzes a related incentive problem that undermines the principal’s ability to induce an agent to exert effort on its behalf. The repeated-game’s enforcement mechanism tends to break down if the principal is trying to get the agent to resolve a problem that, if resolved, (i) creates an ongoing problem for the agent and (ii) simultaneously significantly reduces the agent’s ability to impose future costs on the principal. The principal cannot induce the agent to exert much effort in these circumstances, and the problem persists.

The pitfalls of a centralized bureaucracy

The incentive problem is a vital issue in all transition economies and China is not an exception. This paper summarises how China partially solved this problem at early stages of post-Mao reforms and why the Chinese solution is only transitory, which explains severe problems that China is facing now. The paper also discusses the incentive mechanisms in the judicial system and the effect of the soft budget constraint (SBC) syndrome on incentives, including the relationship between institutions and innovation.