Judicial Discretion and Optimal Environmental Enforcement

Sentencing guidelines, judicial discretion and plea bargaining

The United States Sentencing Commission was created to develop federal sentencing guidelines, which restrict judicial discretion and were found to increase the average sentence length while leaving unchanged the likelihood of resolution through plea bargaining. A game theoretic model is developed in which a sentencing commission may impose guidelines or defer to judicial discretion; then a defe...

Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Self-Enforcement∗

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. Unlike prior work, we characterize rules that are self-enforcing: the government must p...

Judicial Review and Non - Enforcement at The

Can the President refuse to enforce a law he deems unconstitutional? Take the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court upheld the provision in the Act mandating that individuals purchase health insurance, but leading Republicans continue to press the view that the law is unconstitutional. Suppose one such Republican captures the presidency in 2016. His first act in office is to recommend legislat...

Comments on [Israeli] Proposal for Structuring Judicial Discretion in Sentencing

Optimal fines for environmental noncompliance under a decentralized enforcement policy

We consider the determination of the optimal ne for noncompliance by a legislator who anticipates the inspection game between an autonomous inspection agency and polluting rms. This agency can make the inspection of individual rms contingent on ambient pollution. The agency's autonomy implies that it cannot commit itself to announced inspection probabilities. If the legislator centralizes the d...