The Kodila-Tedika & Bolito-Losembe (2014, ADR) finding on no evidence of causality flowing from State fragility to classical corruption or extreme corruption could have an important influence on academic and policy debates. Using updated data (1996-2010) from 53 African countries, we provide evidence of a positive (negative) nexus between political stability/no violence and corruption-control (...

I examine the effects that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized almost 3 million immigrants, had on crime in the United States. I exploit the IRCAs quasi-random timing as well as geographic variation in the intensity of treatment to isolate causal impacts. I find decreases in crime of 2%-6%, primarily due to decline in property crimes, equivalent to 80,000-240,000...

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden “unofficial” activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse bureaucratic corruption, greater incidence of mafia protection, and have less faith in the court system. Our f...

This paper concludes that, when offenders are wealth constrained and the government is resource constrained and can commit to a certain policy throughout the whole planning horizon, cost minimizing deterrence is decreasing, rather than increasing, in the number of offenses. By extending the framework, suggested in Emons (2003), to n-periods setting, we prove that for the agents who may commit a...

Empirical evidence about the relationship between legal gambling and crime is mixed; some studies find that legalized gambling increases crime and others find no relationship between legalized gambling and crime, controlling for other factors like hotels. We develop a utility maximizing model of time spent in legal work, crime, and leisure and use this model to understand the relationship betwe...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in compliance. Among different mailing conditions a legal threat that stresses a high detection risk has a signifi...

We analyze a model where firms chose a production technology which, together with some random event, determines the final emission level. We consider the coexistence of two alternative technologies: a “clean” technology, and a “dirty” technology. The environmental regulation is based on taxes over reported emissions, and on penalties over unreported emissions. We show that the optimal inspectio...

This paper examines the impact of private prison contracting by exploiting staggered capacity shocks in Mississippi. Motivated a model based on typical contract that pays per diem for each occupied bed, empirical analysis shows inmates serve 90 additional days. is alternatively estimated as 4.8 percent average sentence. The delayed release erodes half cost savings offered and linked to greater ...

Regulation is widely considered as the key issue in reforms of public service sectors. But it has been pointed early to the problem that regulatory capture could undermine the stated aims of the reforms. This paper reviews the concept and the literature of regulatory capture under the special focus of public service sectors. Although mentioning corruption as an important mean way of capture, th...

We draw on variations in the reach of capital punishment statutes between 1977 and 2004 to identify the deterrent effects associated with capital eligibility. Focusing on the most prevalent eligibility expansion, we estimate that the adoption of a child murder factor is associated with an approximately 20% reduction in the child murder rate. Eligibility expansions may enhance deterrence by (i) ...