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Special Issue: Cesare Beccaria: back to the future of law and economics
Crime is currently a flourishing domain of investigation in law and economics, to the point that many studies on this topic have trespassed the boundaries of the discipline and become attractive even for well-known mainstream economics journals. Newly available datasets have made it possible to refresh our current understanding of crime and test some of the theoretical tenets dating back to the visionary thinker Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794). More than 250 years ago, he published the seminal book Trattato Dei Delitti e delle Pene, which provided a new and modern way to look at punishment and sanctions.
Despite being still mostly known today for his booklet on crime, and the positions propounded therein against the death sentence and cruelty in punishment, Beccaria’s real contribution to science has been in direction of changing our way of thinking about institutions, by promoting the alignment of private incentives and the public interest. This is precisely the core of the law and economics approach.
This Special Issue discusses the main elements and impact of Beccaria's work, with special reference to punishment. The issue is concluded with an independently-submitted paper, which in our view perfectly fits and completes the overview provided in this issue: Yahagi (2018) opens the way to a fascinating - and so far not intensively discussed - perspective on the industrial organization of crime, focusing on criminal organizations and their effects on social welfare. A large part of this chapter of knowledge remains still to be written and - in the footsteps of Beccaria - we invite scholars to walk this way.
Editors
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Giovanni Battista Ramello
DiGSPES, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, Italy
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Alain Marciano
MRE and University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France
Articles (7 in this collection)
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How much should we trust crime statistics? A comparison between EU and US
Authors (first, second and last of 4)
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