You may do your own topic, but you must get my approval in advance. This approval is in two stages. First, you should discuss with me the general concept well in advance, so that we can narrow down a specific research question. Second, you must then present me with a brief outline of how you plan to tackle the research question, and at least 3 references by Nov. 2nd.
The following topics sometimes have references – these are just a starting point, you need to find your own references as well. See the Essay Resource Page on
referencing for some ideas for general referencing.
1. Plea bargaining between prosecutors and defense lawyers is a key component of most guilty findings in Canada and the United States . What are the costs and benefits to society of plea bargaining? What does it do to the incentives and decision-making of criminals? Is it fair to victims? Is it efficient (does it pass the cost-benefit test)?
2. Resolved: Marijuana should be legalized, and regulated in a manner similar to tobacco or alcohol. What are the costs and benefits of legalization? Is it a good idea? Do you think it should be legalized? Look to evidence from other countries’ experience with decriminalization (no country has legalized), and past experience in various countries who legalized alcohol at various stages.
See the many references in the
notes to section 9 of the course.
3. Resolved: Cocaine (OR heroin) should be legalized and a harm reduction program to reduce addiction should be implemented. What are the costs and benefits of legalization? Is it a good idea? Do you think it should be legalized? Look at other countries experiences with harm reduction models (e.g.
Britain), as well as the experiments in
Vancouver.
See the many references in the
notes to section 9 of the course.
4. Blizzard Entertainment runs the online video game “World of Warcraft.” Players in this game pay a monthly fee in order to take an on-line character, and try and build up their abilities and their gaming level. By doing so, players not only gain their own self-satisfaction, but are also able to play in more complex settings (often by joining guilds and participating in multi-player raids).
“A
farmer is a general term for a
MMORPG player who attempts to acquire ("farm") items of value within a game, usually in order to exploit the game's
virtual economy. This is usually accomplished by carrying out in-game actions (such as killing an important creature) repeatedly to maximize income. More broadly, the term could refer to a player of any type of game who repeats mundane actions over and over in order to collect in-game items. … A
gold farmer is a player who farms items for the sole purpose of sale to other players via an out-of-game venue, such as
eBay or
IGE (also called
RMT -
Real-money trading). Since there is significant real-world demand for in-game gold, gold farming sometimes is taken very seriously. Most modern MMORPGs include terms of service that forbid this kind of activity, so gold farmers tend to be secretive about their real life (and online) identities.”
What are the “costs” to this virtual society of illegal farming? What are the costs to the real economy? What motivates the decision of the “criminal”? Why are most farmers Chinese (according to my son, anyways)? Help Blizzard to design an appropriate set of prevention and punishment methods to appropriately reduce farming to a desirable level. Is Blizzard’s desirable level the same as the desirable level for the overall virtual WOW community? Explain carefully. (Similar problems exist with Sony’s game, Everquest, if you are more familiar with it.)
As background, you may like to consult the following:
· An online article by Robert Shapiro at Slate.msn.com, “Fantasy Economics: Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games” at
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078053.
5. The University is reconsidering its academic misconduct policy, with a larger emphasis on education and restorative justice. (I can provide you with a copy of the committee’s orders from the VP Academic). Use the economics of crime approach to create suggestions on how to redesign our policy. Remember – punishment is not everything, there is a role for education and restorative justice. Appropriate readings include
· Joe Kerkvliet, “Cheating by Economics Students: A Comparison of Survey Results,” Journal of Economic Education, Spring 1994, pages 121-133.
· Douglas Bunn et. al., “Crime in the Classroom: An Economic Analysis of Undergraduate Student Cheating Behaviour,” Journal of Economic Education, Summer 1992, pages 197-207.
· Julia Christensen-Hughes, “??”, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, November 2006, which will apparently be published soon. There is a summary of the research in the Oct. 2, 2006 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Academic Integrity Gets a Bad Grade in Survey of University Students in Canada,” by Karen Birchard (I can get you a copy).
· J. Weinstein and C. Dobkin, “Plagiarism in U.S. Higher Education: Estimating Internet Plagiarism Rates and Testing a Means of Deterrence,” University ofCalifornia (Berkeley), mimeo Nov. 2002 (available from H. King).
6. Explain and evaluate the “broken windows” approach to policing, with an emphasis on the economics analysis of this approach.
· George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities Simon & Schuster 1996.
· H. Corman and H. N. Mocan, “Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows,” Journal of Law and Economics, April 2005. Also published as NBER Working Paper no. 9061, available through the library webpage.
· S. D. Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell…” in our coursepack (where it is discussed under “Better Policing Strategies” on page 172). He also discusses it in his Freaknonomics book.
7. Should Prostitution or any of the attendant aspects of it (soliciting, selling, advertising, pimping) be a crime? If you decide it should be a crime, how would you reduce its prevalence and its problems? If you decide it should not be a crime, how would you reduce the negative aspects? (Group work: do both.)
· D. Duchesne, “Street Prostitution in Canada,” Juristat Reader, 1999
· The Economist, “It’s Their Business,” Jan. 4, 2001, “Sex for sale, legally,” July 11th, 2001, “Red lights ahead,” Sept. 6, 2001, “It’s a Foreigner’s Game,” Sept. 4, 2004 (Available from H. King)
· B. Milman, “New Rules for the Oldest Profession: Should We Change Our Prostitution Laws?” (1980), Spring 1980, Vol. 3 Harvard Women’s Law Journal
· S. Wortley et. al., “Vice Lessons: A Survey Of Prostitution Offenders Enrolled In The Toronto John SchoolDiversion Program”, Canadian Journal of Criminology, Oct. 2002
8. Use the Economics of Crime approach to analyze the U.S. government’s attempts to stop on-line gambling – George Bush is about to sign a law criminalizing online gambling. Why are they criminalizing online gambling, when casinos are spread across the U.S. Is this socially optimal? Given low entry, can targeting supply-side work? Critically analyse whether or not there is much chance of success, and is so, how? Would a harm-reduction approach work better? Explain how such an approach might work.
· See “The Gambling Is Virtual; the Money Is Real”, By MATT RICHTEL and HEATHER TIMMONS, New York Times, July 25, 2006, “For the first time, Washington has succeeded in temporarily shutting down a publicly owned gambling site, and its effort has operators’ share prices plummeting.”
· See “Bodog boss Ayre steers clear of U.S.”, by SINCLAIR STEWART, Globe and Mail July 26, 2006, “Ever since Calvin Ayre landed on the cover of Forbes magazine's annual billionaires issue, people have been assailing him with one question: Why isn't he taking advantage of the growing thirst for gambling stocks with an initial public offering of his company, Bodog Entertainment Group? Last week, they got their answer. A British gambling executive was handcuffed at a Dallas airport by U.S. authorities after a routine stopover, in part because his company accepts bets from Americans. The arrest cast a pall over the gambling sector, which is largely based inBritain, undercutting stock prices and prompting concerns that Internet sports betting and casino operations could be facing a serious crackdown.”
· Also see the Economist for July 22nd, 2006, “Online gambling: Out of Luck”, and several other news articles that H. King has.
9. The BC Justice Review Task Force has argued for a comprehensive, community court approach to chronic offenders and street crime. Summarize the recommendations and their rationale, and analyze their approach using the Economics of Crime approach.
· I also suggest you spend some time looking at B.C. newspapers for local reaction.
10. Summarize the economic case for and against the death penalty, and provide a conclusion. Your conclusion may incorporate other arguments (e.g. philosophical arguments). Focus on deterrence and the benefits and costs to society of capital punishment.
· Ilyana Kuziemko, “Does the Threat of the Death Penalty Affect Plea Bargaining in Murder Cases? Evidence from
New York’s 1995 Reinstatement of Capital Punishment,”
American Law and Economics Review, 2006 8: 116-14. The abstract is
here.
· J. Donohue and J. Wolfers, “The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrence,”.
Economics Voice, April 2006, online at
www.bepress.com/ev. In addition, take a look at the reply by Paul Rubin (same issue), counter-reply by Donohue and Wolfers, and counter-counter reply by Rubin.
· H. Dezhbakhsh and J. Shepherd, “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence from a “Judicial Experiment”,” Economic Inquiry, July 2006.
· Dr. Ken Leyton-Brown in the History department is carrying out a large research project on this topic – talk to him.
· K. Avio, “Capital Punishment in Canada: A Time-Series Analysis of the Deterrent Hypothesis,” Canadian Journal of Economics, Nov. 1979.
· I. Ehrlich, “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment - A Question of Life and Death,” American Economic Review, Vol. 65 (3), June 1975, pp. 397-417
· Lawrence Katz, Steven D. Levitt, Ellen Shustorovich, “Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence,” American Law and Economics Review, Aug 2003. (See also Levitt’s references to capital punishment in his article “Understanding Why Crime Fell…” in our coursepack.)
11. Do an updated, first-class version of the Brantingham and
Easton cost study. You should substantially improve on my presentation in class by examining carefully the assumptions I have made (explicit and implicit), and improving them. For many of the costs I presented, I did work that was not in Brantingham and
Easton (but did not do it that deeply, or tie off all the lose ends). Secondly, for many of the costs calculated by Brantingham and
Easton directly, I merely took their 1996 data on total crime costs by different type of crime and adjusted it by the inflation rate to find the 2006 costs. A better approach would have been to use the per crime cost they took, adjusted the per crime cost for inflation, found the new crime
quantities, and done the appropriate multiplication.
12. Use the Economics of Crime approach to analyse reducing violence in hockey. From a social viewpoint, is it a crime that needs to be reduced? If we decided to reduce it, how would we successfully do it? (Investigate how other sports have reduced violence, specifically some rather famous cases in basketball.) Articles include:
· J. Heckelman and A. Yates, “And a Hockey Game Broke out: Crime and Punishment in the NHL,” Economic Inquiry, Oct. 2003.
· W. David Allen, “Cultures of Illegality in the National Hockey League,” Southern Economic Journal, 2005, 71(3), pages 494-513.
· J. Feinstein, The Punch : One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight that Changed Basketball, Back Bay Books, 2003.
13. Use the Economics of Crime approach to find a policy to reduce the prevalence of marijuana grow-operations (assume legalization is not an option). Be sure to present arguments on how criminals decide whether or not to proceed in this setting, and how to alter enforcement and punishment to reduce the number of grow-ops.
· S. Easton, “Marijuana Growth in British Columbia,” Public Policy Sources #74, 2004, Fraser Institute,
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