Person: Givati, Yehonatan
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Givati
First Name
Yehonatan
Name
Givati, Yehonatan
3 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Publication Essays in Law and Economics(2013-10-08) Givati, Yehonatan; Shleifer, Andrei; Hart, Oliver; Alesina, AlbertoPart I examines the consequences of an organizational reform in Israel that transferred the responsibility for housing arrestees from the police to the prison authority. Using the staggered introduction of the reform in different regions of the country, we show that the reform led to an increase in the number of arrests and to a decrease in the number of reported crimes, with effects concentrated in more minor crimes. The reform also led to a decrease in the quality of arrests, measured by the likelihood of indictment following an arrest. These findings are consistent with the idea that the reform externalized the cost of housing arrestees from the Police's perspective, and therefore led to an increase in police activity. Part II examines why some countries mandate a long maternity leave, while others mandate only a short one. We incorporate into a standard mandated-benefit model social tolerance of gender-based discrimination, showing that the less tolerant a society is of gender-based discrimination, the longer the maternity leave it will mandate. Relying on recent research in psychology and linguistics we collected new data on the number of gender-differentiated personal pronouns across languages to capture societies' attitudes toward gender-based discrimination. We first confirm, using within-country language variation, that our linguistic measure is correlated with attitudes toward gender-based discrimination. Then, using cross-country data on length of maternity leave we find a strong correlation between our language-based measure of attitudes and the length of maternity leave. Part III examines why plea bargaining is commonly employed in some countries, while its use is heavily restricted in others. I develop a model in which a social planner, who minimizes the social harms from punishing the innocent and not punishing the guilty, decides on the optimal scope of plea bargaining. The model shows that a lower social emphasis on ensuring that innocent individuals are not punished leads to a greater use of plea bargaining. Using new cross-country data on social preferences for punishing the innocent versus not punishing the guilty and a new coding of plea bargaining regimes, I find results that are consistent with the model's prediction.Publication Judicial Deference to Inconsistent Agency Statutory Interpretations(University of Chicago Press, 2011) Givati, Yehonatan; Stephenson, MatthewAlthough administrative law doctrine requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable statutory interpretation, the doctrine is unclear as to whether an agency gets less deference when it changes its own prior interpretation. We formally analyze how judicial deference to revised agency interpretations affects the ideological content of agencies’ interpretations. We find a nonmonotonic relationship between judicial deference to inconsistent agency interpretations and interpretive extremism. This relationship arises because as courts become less deferential to revised interpretations, the initial agency finds it more attractive to promulgate a moderate interpretation that will not be revised. However, the less deferential the courts, the more extreme this moderate interpretation becomes. Normatively, our results suggest that an interest in responsiveness of interpretive policy to the preferences of the incumbent leadership favors deference to revised interpretations, whereas an interest in ideological moderation favors a somewhat less deferential posture to interpretive revisions.Publication Resolving Legal Uncertainty: The Unfulfilled Promise of Advance Tax Rulings(2009) Givati, YehonatanAdvance tax rulings allow taxpayers to achieve certainty about the tax consequences of contemplated transactions, and are thus considered indispensable in the modern world of tax administration and compliance. After providing empirical evidence of tax law uncertainty, which should give rise to a demand for advance tax rulings, the article shows that advance tax rulings are in fact infrequently used. To explain this counterintuitive finding the article analyzes the taxpayers' strategic considerations when deciding whether to request an advance tax ruling. The strategic disadvantages of applying for an advance tax ruling are shown usually to outweigh the strategic advantages of such a request. Since the same strategic considerations apply when taxpayers decide whether to request an advance pricing agreement - a new procedure for resolving transfer pricing disputes - this analysis also explains why, despite considerable attention from scholars and practitioners in recent years, advance pricing agreements have been infrequently used, and are therefore unlikely to resolve the transfer pricing problem - probably the most significant problem in modern international taxation.