According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The results show that severe sanctions almost perfectly deter free-riding. However, people also obey law ba...

debate over whether economic sanctions "work" is mired in a scholarly limbo. One writer contends that recent international relations scholarship has promoted optimism about the utility of such measures and sets out to challenge this trend} while another notes the pessimism that "pervades the sanctions literature" and proceeds to argue that it is unjustified.2 A third scholar cites the sanctions...

The impact of the international sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran in 2013 and also accessibility of medicines in this country have received a lot of media coverage. In this study we used the data collected from a group of pharmacies all located in Tehran to assess the potential effects of the banking sanctions on access to asthma medicines. Data were collected from forty community pharmacie...

A long line of legal scholarship has examined how formal or legal sanctions can deter misbehavior or facilitate cooperation. A second strand of legal scholarship asks how informal or reputational sanctions can accomplish these same goals. Insufficient attention has been paid to why, in reality, these two kinds of sanctions often co-exist and how they interact with each other. This paper attempt...

The Effect of Sanctions on the Job Finding Rate: Evidence from Denmark This paper investigates the effect of sanctions of unemployment insurance benefits on the exit rate from unemployment for a sample of Danish unemployed. According to the findings are that even moderate sanctions have rather large effects. For both males and females the exit rate increases by more than 50% following impositio...

The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast, not only comes with a danger that punishments will be misapplied, but also should have no efficiency b...

Financial institutions need to meet rising sanctions compliance demands without disrupting customer service or incurring inordinate costs. While robust filtering technology is essential to managing compliance, the most cost-effective approach combines intelligent technology, people and processes while fostering self-learning and improvement in all three components. This white paper describes th...

Economic sanctions have the reputation of harming the population in the sanctioned countries. In this paper, I investigate under what circumstances such harm occurs and what is its magnitude. I estimate the impact of in utero exposure to sanctions episodes on infant weight, child height, and child mortality. Using a large child level data set from 69 countries, I …nd that being exposed to sanct...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of bene t reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the e ects of UI sanctions in Germany is missing. Using administrative data we investigate the e ects of sanctions on the reemployment probability in West Germany for a period before the Hartz reforms. By applying a matching appr...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences are used as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of sanctions on the drop-out from welfare an...