Beyond the Economics of Crime

Recent economic research on socially harmful activities has generated new theoretical insights and empirical observations that are increasingly attracting the attention of policy-makers, regulators, and the public at large.  Examples are recent studies that examine the economics of illegal employment, tax evasion, environmental pollution, medical malpractice, and white-collar crime among others.

Despite the wide range of specific policy settings, a common element of this research is that it is concerned with activities that are socially harmful, but that do not obviously qualify as crimes, even though regulators may choose to classify them as such.  In such settings, in which activities can cover an entire spectrum ranging from the perfectly permissible to the severely sanctioned, the classical literature on the Economics of Crime leaves important issues unresolved.

Typical issues that arise in the context of studying the economics of socially harmful activities are:

• the optimal structure of sanctioning technologies  given the nature and scale of a socially harmful activity;
• the optimal relationship between sanctioning technologies and sanctioning institutions;
• the optimal organization and coordination between sanctioning institutions;
• constraints on  the design of sanctioning regimes driven by political economy factors (such as equity issues);
• behavioral constraints on the design of sanctioning regimes;
• government failure (such as over-regulation) as a contributing factor to socially harmful activities

The aim of the workshop is to move the economics of crime and punishment forward by considering unresolved issues and sharing new approaches.

 Researchers studying specific topics within the ambit of socially harmful activities are frequently confronted with similar challenges in terms of an appropriate analytical framework, empirical methods, and conceptual approaches. The workshop is intended to provide an opportunity

• to harness research synergies that exist between the various topics,
• to share insights on how to tackle the existing challenges in this exciting area of research, and
• to break new ground in terms of approaches, techniques, and methods.

The workshop will offer researchers in fields of Public Economics broadly defined, in particular such as the Economics of Regulation and Law and Economics, the opportunity to join each other for two days in an intensive research atmosphere.