Linkage of statistical archives and judicial decisions: a methodology for the integration of textual and numeric databases

The Institute of Economics will hold a webinar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Tuesday, June 1, 2021: Maria Francesca Romano from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna will present the paper "Linkage of statistical archives and judicial decisions: a methodology for the integration of textual and numeric databases".

All interested participants are welcome to join online at the following link. External participants need to contact the organisers via email to grant access to the seminar.

Abstract:

We present the results obtained (an article already published in Federalismi.it and another article submitted to Social Indicators Research). The articles apply a text mining strategy to a dataset of final judgments of the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation to identify its characteristic elements and categorize them. The results of text mining analysis are then linked with the Orbis and ASIA archives to design a database with statistical characteristics (reliability, completeness, updating). Subsequent statistical analyses or modelling are possible on sets of data suitably extracted from the implemented statistical database. The application presented refers to measure and investigate the corruption phenomenon (i.e., corruption events subject to judicial decisions): it allows to extract from the official sources (judgments) helpful information both for the qualitative and quantitative description of the corruption phenomenon and for elaborating "objective indicators" (geographical or functional) to be used in contrast strategies and scientific research. Therefore, the methodology proposed can contribute significantly to the definition of policies to fight corruption in the broader perspective of an evidence-based criminal policy. The proposed methodology can also be applied in various and different fields (estimates of economic impact of corruption, for example) merging data from official and non official sources of data.

References:

Romano M.F. (2017), Dalle parole ai numeri: estrarre dati dalle sentenze della magistratura. In Rey G.M.(ed), La mafia come impresa. Analisi del sistema economico criminale e delle politiche di contrasto, Franco Angeli, pp. 121-154.

Romano MF (2020), Methodological innovations to estimate illegal economy, in Dall’incertezza alla decisione consapevole: un percorso da fare insieme, Atti della 13a Conferenza Nazionale di Statistica, ISTAT, 4-6 luglio 2018 Roma, ISBN 9788845820168, pp. 142-148.

Romano M.F., Morgante G., Baldassarini A., Di Vetta G., Pavone P. (2020), La misurazione della corruzione attraverso le sentenze della magistratura: una proposta metodologica con strumenti di text mining, FEDERALISMI.IT, 33, pp. 164-187.

Romano M.F., Morgante G., Baldassarini A., Di Vetta G., Pavone P. (submitted to Social Indicators Research), Linkage of statistical archives and judicial decisions: a methodology for the integration of textual and numeric databases.