Modern corporate bankruptcy law has been shaped, and some of it written, by special interests. Even so, the law is rooted in American ideals of renewal, and of viewing failure in the marketplace as a sign of effort and gumption, not moral collapse. It's a powerful idea - shedding the past to...

This paper examines the manner by which transactions costs in financial markets, broadly defined, not only derive from the regulatory-institutional framework, but in turn affect the development of this framework. We develop a simple model of policymaking with common agency that embeds endogenous...

The social role of science is to produce reliable knowledge within the bounds of safety for subjects and subsequent users. Regulations in human subjects protection, research misconduct and control of conflict of interest have failed to prevent widespread bias and irreproducibility in scientific...

Using data from the "Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Corruption in America Survey", we construct indices measuring two specific forms of corruption across American states: illegal and legal. We define illegal corruption as the private gains in the form of cash or gifts by a government...

After a fitful but ultimately promising start in the 1970s, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been severely limited in its ability to regulate toxic chemicals in the workplace. Restrained by court rulings and bullied by powerful corporate interests, OSHA issues health...

The concept of institutional corruption can be used to identify any possible procedural practice, within or outside the government, capable of distorting the missions of that institution. The distortion may be broad or narrow, compromise the whole or a part, and affect some members or every...

Corruption in general and doping in particular are ubiquitous in both amateur and professional sports and have taken the character of a systemic threat. In creating unfair advantages, doping distorts the level playing field in sporting competition. With higher stakes involved, such distortions...

Previous research on unethical behavior in organizations suggests that employees who engage in such behavior are motivated by the desire to advance their own self-interest, often acting selfishly at the expense of their own organizations. However, such behaviors also may be motivated by...

Drawing on accounts of regulatory capture in which industry influence activities shift regulators' mindsets apart from incentives or information, this paper develops a formal model of capture as a shift in a policymaking agent’s preferences, due to costly actions by the industry. One type of...

This study offers an extension of Grossman and Helpman (1994) political-economic framework to model an industry regulated by an integrated system of both direct and market-based policies. The model is incorporated into a normative theoretical analysis and serves as a basis for structural...