In major legal orders such as UK, the U.S., Germany, and France, bribers and recipients face equally severe criminal sanctions. In contrast, countries like China, Russia, and Japan treat the briber more mildly. Given these differences between symmetric and asymmetric punishment regimes for...

Extortive petty corruption takes place when a public official elicits small bribes from citizens for providing public services that the citizens are legally entitled to receive. We implement a novel experimental design that mimics this phenomenon and explores bottom-up approaches for its...

Motivations for introducing a statutory minimum wage in developing countries include reducing poverty, advancing social justice, and accelerating growth. Attaining these goals depends on the national context and policy choices. Institutional capacity tends to be limited, so institutional...

A well-functioning justice system is indispensable to business activity and to a society as a whole. Judicial efficiency measured by trial length, one of the essential factors in the effectiveness of the justice system, ensures contract enforcement, which is the basis of market transactions....

We examine how the articulation of government policy affects behavior. Our experiment compares a government mandate to purchase health insurance to a financially equivalent tax on the uninsured. Participants report their probability of purchasing health insurance under one of the two...

This paper examines the impact of crime and insecurity on support for and satisfaction with democracy and trust in institutions. We use survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) for Colombia during the 2004-2010 period. We find that perceptions of insecurity, crime...

Informal monitors can sometimes substitute for formal law enforcement. Monitors hired to minimize cheating, however, are themselves vulnerable to collusion and extortion. I focus on one such informal monitor – the fair authorities at the trade fairs at Champagne – asking why the fairs...

We investigate the relationship between political networks, weak institutions, and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan combining: (i) data on political connections between candidates and election officials; (ii) a nationwide controlled evaluation of a novel...