Book Review: The Economics of Organized Crime

On the Economics of Organized Crime

The core function of organized crime is the selling of protection. Protection can be real, against third-party crime, or manufactured by the organized crime groups themselves. Mafias and gangs emerge in areas of weak state control, because of prohibition and geographic, ethnic, or social isolation. Although competition is considered good in economics, in the case of organized crime the predator...

The Economics of Organized Crime and Optimal Law Enforcement

This paper extends the optimal law enforcement literature to organized crime. We model the criminal organization as a vertical structure where the principal extracts some rents from the agents through extortion. Depending on the principal's information set, threats may or may not be credible. As long as threats are credible, the principal is able to fully extract rents. In that case, the result...

Book Review The Economics of Russian Transition

This formidable book, organised into 26 chapters plus 6 scientific and statistical appendices, provides very detailed testimony and analysis of a group of economists, most members of the Institute of Economic Transition (IET) headed by Gaidar, intermittently at or near the helm of the Russian Government and the reforms during 1991–1993, and later leader of 'Democratic Choice', a liberal, market...

The Economics of Crime

JEL codes 1 Int roduct ion 2 Measures and magni tudes 2.1 Participation in crime and offenses per criminal 3 Cr ime in a market context 3.1 The market 3.2 The market model and incapacitation 4 Ev idence on the supply o f c r ime 4.1 The effect of legitimate opportunities: unemployment 4.2 The porous boundary between legal and illegal work 4.3 The effect of legitimate opportunities: earnings ine...

Book Review: The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime