The article presents an analysis of the relations between national state and human rights in Brazil between the years of 1968 and 1996. The purpose is to reconstruct the historical process of the incorporation of this theme as a state policy and to put into evidence the conditionings of the...

This paper offers a quantitative evaluation of the productive efficiency of state courts of first degree in Brazil, based on the stochastic frontier approach [Aigner D.J. (1977), Meeusen W (1977) and Battese and Corra (1977)]. This study exploits the novel database by the Conselho Nacional de...

We study experimentally whether and to what extent impartial decision makers are influenced by stakeholders´ fairness opinions in an allocation decision. The setting allows for different focal fairness rules to be considered. We compare communication treatments, in which one of the stakeholders...

We study how participation in decision processes shapes people's behavior towards impartial authorities. In an incentivized laboratory experiment, an impartial decision maker at first decides about the allocation of money between two subordinates. Treatments differ in the opportunity for one...

The study investigates whether and how strong prison conditions contribute to the perceived propensity to recidivate after controlling for personal characteristics and criminal background. In order to combine different sources of information on personal characteristics of prison inmates and...

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA) affected the U.S. federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws for to crack cocaine offenders, and represented the first Congressional reform of sentencing laws in over 20 years. A primary goal of this legislation was to lessen the harshness of sentences for...

An often-heard argument is that South Africa's very high crime rate is the main reason for the country's small share of business ownership. Combining a fixed-effects model with an instrumental variable approach, we estimate the effect of crime on self-employment and business performance using a...

Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

In this study we investigate the determinants of financing obstacles using survey data on a sample of around 5000 firms from the euro area countries. This completely new survey – started at the end of 2009 - gives us the opportunity to test whether firm characteristics such as size, age,...

This paper uses a non parametric matching procedure to match survey replies to balance sheet information. It draws on the SAFE survey on access to finance for a sample of 11886 firms in the euro area which are matched with their nearest neighbour in an extended dataset with balance sheet...