National culture and occupational fraud magnitude: The moderating role of fraud type

This study investigates the relationship between national culture and the magnitude of occupational fraud. Guided by national culture theory and economic theory of crime, we propose that a country’s culture, as measured by Hofstede’s six national culture dimensions: power distance, individualism, achievement orientation, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence, is related to the magnitude of occupational fraud. Further, we propose that the type of fraud moderates this relationship. We test these effects using a two-level model on a dataset of 2,898 occupational fraud cases across 41 countries. We find that uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation display significant positive association with occupational fraud magnitude (while power distance and achievement orientation display marginally significant positive association). Further, the effects of achievement orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and indulgence are moderated by fraud type (while power distance and long-term orientation show marginally significant interaction effects).

The Economics of Hacking

Hacking is becoming more common and dangerous. The challenge of dealing with hacking often comes from the fact that much of our wisdom about conventional crime cannot be directly applied to understand hacking behavior. Against this backdrop, hacking studies are reviewed in view of the new features of cybercrime and how these features affect the application of the classical economic theory of crime in the cyberspace. Most findings of hacking studies can be interpreted with a parsimonious demand-and-supply framework. Hackers decide whether and how much to “supply” hacking by calculating the return on hacking over other opportunities. Defenders optimally tolerate some level of hacking risks because defense is costly. This tolerance can be interpreted as an indirect “demand” for hacking. Variations in law enforcement, hacking benefits, hacking costs, legal alternatives, private defense, and the dual-use problem can variously affect the supply or demand for hacking, and in turn the equilibrium amount of hacking in the market. Overall, it is suggested that the classical economic theory of crime remains a powerful framework to explain hacking behaviors. However, the application of this theory calls for considerations of different assumptions and driving forces, such as psychological motives and economies of scale in offenses, that are often less prevalent in conventional (offline) criminal behaviors but that tend to underscore hacking in the cyberspace.

A dynamic economic model of criminal activity in the criminal law

Poverty and crime are two major problem areas. The economic theory of crime shows a direct correlation between poverty and crime. In this study, we propose a model that shows the correlation between poverty and crime. Then we obtain the dynamic system of the proposed model. In the next step, we will compute the reproductive number by finding the maximum eigenvalue of Jacobian matrix to study of stability and un-stability of the presented model.

The Economic Approach to the Analysis of Acquisitive Crimes

The article analyzes the efficiency of various forms of punishment for acquisitive crimes in the light of the economic theory of crime proposed by G. S. Becker. The authors consider Russian legislation in this context and argue for the preference of the fine sanctions over the imprisonment.

Eine panelökonometrische Evaluation des deutschen Strafverfolgungssystems / A Panel-econometric Evaluation of the German Criminal Prosecution System

SummaryAccording to the economic theory of crime, a rise in expected punishment - i.e. the product of probability and severity of punishment - results in a reduction of crime due to deterrence. What appears to be a simple and straightforward hypothesis turns out to be a demanding task for empirical examination because “crime” is composed of many different offence categories and expected punishment is influenced by the actions and decisions of different institutions such as police, public prosecutor’s office and the courts, and, thus, varies with respect to clearance and conviction rate as well as decisions regarding form (fine, probation, imprisonment) and size (length of prison sentence and size of fine) of punishment. Moreover, it makes a difference whether offenders are subject to general or juvenile criminal law. Usually, empirical analyses of crime/deterrence take simultaneous account of only a fraction of the items detailed above. In order to overcome this shortcoming the author has established a unique database combining information from different sources of official judicial statistics covering the German states for the period 1977-2001. Building on this database a comprehensive system of criminal prosecution indicators is derived and subsequently related to the incidence of six major offence categories using panel-econometrics. Revealing many negative significant effects for clearance and conviction rates but mostly insignificant coefficients for indicators of form and size of punishment the estimation results suggest that deterrence is mainly exerted at the initial levels of the criminal prosecution process. Finally, the econometric estimates are used in order to assess cost reductions for crime victims from increases in the severity of criminal prosecution. Thus, intensifying criminal prosecution permanently by 10 percent would reduce victims’ costs by at least € 250 million p.a.