We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...

We estimate the effect of state judiciary presence on rent extraction in Brazilian local governments. We measure rents as irregularities related to waste or corruption uncovered by auditors. Our unique dataset at the level of individual inspections allows us to separately examine extensive and...

International business transactions pose the problem of deterring bribing of public officials by foreign firms. We first analyze a convention styled after the OECD's "Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions" that requires signatory...

This paper studies many-to-one matching markets where each student is assigned to a hospital. Each hospital has possibly multiple positions and responsive preferences. We study the game induced by the student-optimal stable matching mechanism. We assume that students play their weakly dominant...

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the...

In this paper we consider dynamic processes, in repeated games, that are subject to the natural informational restriction of uncoupledness. We study the almost sure convergence to Nash equilibria, and present a number of possibility and impossibility results. Basically, we show that if in...

We compare the transmission of fiscal shocks in four OECD countries and in the Euro area. Fiscal shocks are identified in a SVAR by the restrictions that disturbances to government consumption, government investment and government employment increase output and deficits contemporaneously. These...

We study how to promote compliance with rules in every day situations. Having access to unique data on the universe of users of all public libraries in Barcelona, we test the effect of sending email messages with different contents. We find that users return their items earlier if asked to do...

This paper estimates the effect of piracy attacks on shipping costs using a unique data set on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. We look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy attacks and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to around a ten percent...

We develop a model in which delinquents compete with each other in criminal activities but may benefit from being friends with other criminals by learning and acquiring proper know-how on the crime business. By taking the social network connecting agents as given, we study the subgame perfect...