This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to generate some of the first revealed preference value of a statistical life (VSL) estimates from a low-income setting. We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality risk and cost as they travel to and from the...

This paper aims at providing a Bayesian parametric framework to tackle the accessibility problem across space in urban theory. Adopting continuous variables in a probabilistic setting we are able to associate with the distribution density to the Kendall's tau index and replicate the general...

We compare popular school choice mechanisms in terms of children's access to better schools (ABS) than their catchment area school, in districts with school stratification and where priority is given for residence in the catchment area of the school. In a large market model with two good schools...

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...

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...

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...

In a market where firms with different characteristics decide upon both the level of emissions and their reports, we study the optimal audit policy for an enforcement agency whose objective is to minimize the level of emissions. We show that it is optimal to devote the resources primarily to the...

This paper analyses the interplay between social structure and information exchange in two competing activities, crime and labor. We consider a dynamic model in which individuals belong to mutually exclusive two-person groups, referred to as dyads. Two individuals belonging to the same dyad hold...

Compliance is an important issue in environmental regulation. In this paper, we discuss some of the key elements of the problem and analyze a situation where emissions are not random and firms are risk-neutral. We study the firm's decision on emissions and compliance when the environmental...