Browsing by Author "Marreiros, Helia"
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- Measuring drug policy evolution: a cross-country analysisPublication . Gonçalves, Ricardo; Lourenço. Ana; Marreiros, HeliaDrug policies significantly impact public health and criminal justice outcomes, yet quantitative tools for systematically comparing approaches across jurisdictions remain limited. This paper uses a state-of-the-art comparative law method – leximetrics – to construct the Illicit Drugs Policy Indexes (IDPI), a valuable resource for assessing the evolution of drug policies over time within a specific country as well as across countries. The IDPI consists of a set of indexes corresponding to multiple dimensions of drug policy, including laws around consumption, possession and traffic. These indexes examine illicit drug laws and policies across seven countries: Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom, over a timeframe of twenty years from 1996 to 2016. Our results identify significant turning points in the evolution of laws regarding drugs, often indicating a shift towards less criminal-oriented approaches. Moreover, the paper identifies the countries which progressed more in that direction, over time. The underlying IDPI methodology provides policymakers and researchers with a standardized framework for evidence-based drug policy evaluation and reform, adaptable across jurisdictions.
- Voting as a war of attritionPublication . Kwiek, Maksymilian; Marreiros, Helia; Vlassopoulos, MichaelWe study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of their preferences and may help to select the alternative correctly more often than simple majority. In a series of laboratory experiments, we investigate how various rules affect the outcome reached. We vary the amount of feedback and the communication protocol available to voters: complete secrecy about the pattern of support; feedback about this support; public communication; and within-group communication. The feedback no-communication mechanism is worse than no feedback benchmark in all measures of welfare—the efficient alternative is chosen less often, waiting cost is higher, and thus net welfare is lower. Our headline result is that adding communication restores net efficiency, but in different ways. Public communication does poorly in terms of selecting the correct alternative, but limits the cost of delay, while group communication improves allocative efficiency, but has at best a moderate effect on delay.