Finders Keepers: Forfeiture Laws, Policing Incentives, and Local Budgets
Finders Keepers: Forfeiture Laws, Policing Incentives, and Local Budgets
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发现者守护者：没收法、治安激励措施和地方预算
DOI：
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发表时间：
2004
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
M. Jacobson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Katherine Baicker;M. Jacobson
为了鼓励缉毒警察，联邦政府和许多州政府都颁布了法律，允许警察机构保留他们在毒品逮捕中没收的相当大一部分资产。然而，通过调整自己对警察预算的分配，县政府可以有效地破坏这些激励措施，将额外的资源用于其他用途。我们使用了一个丰富的新的数据集警察缉获和县支出，探索地方政府和警察的反应，这些法律所产生的复杂的激励措施。我们发现，地方政府确实通过减少对警务的其他拨款来抵消警察的缉获量，破坏了法律创造的法定激励。在财政困难时期，他们更有可能这样做。反过来，一旦考虑到当地的抵消，警察就会对缉获的真实的净激励做出反应，而不仅仅是法规中规定的激励。当事实上的政策允许警察保留他们扣押的资产时，他们会扣押更多的资产。这些发现对使用财政激励解决联邦系统中公共产品提供中的代理问题的有效性具有强烈的影响：代理人会对激励做出反应，干预政府也会做出反应，而联邦和州法律影响代理人行为的有效性受到地方政府将资金转用于其他用途的能力的限制。
In order to encourage anti-drug policing, both the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of assets that they seize in drug arrests. By adjusting their own allocations to police budgets, however, county governments can effectively undermine these incentives, capturing the additional resources for other uses. We use a rich new data set on police seizures and county spending to explore the reactions of both local governments and police to the complex incentives generated by these laws. We find that local governments do indeed offset the seizures that police make by reducing their other allocations to policing, undermining the statutory incentive created by the laws. They are more likely to do so in times of fiscal distress. Police, in turn, respond to the real net incentives for seizures, once local offsets are taken into account, not simply the incentives set out in statute. When de facto policies allow police to keep the assets they seize, they seize more. These findings have strong implications for the effectiveness of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in the provision of public goods in a federal system: agents respond to incentives, but so do intervening governments, and the effectiveness of federal and state laws in influencing agents' behavior is limited by the ability of local governments to divert funds to other uses.