In this paper a public bureau can extract surplus value from the services it provides not only by misrepresenting its production costs to its oversight committee but also by influencing the perceptions of the legislative body such as the parliament or the congress and the public at large by...

This paper characterizes optimal income tax and audit schemes in the presence of costly enforcement when the agent is risk averse and not necessarily risk neutral. It is shown that the results under risk-neutrality (Chander and Wilde (1998)) largely hold under risk aversion. We first show that...

It is a well-established fact that corruption is a widespread phenomenon. An important aspect of corruption is that two parties act jointly in order to further their own interests at the expense of a third party. The response of the third party has a significant impact on the persistence of...

We model a hierarchy consisting of possibly corrupted agents who process information, and consider the problem of designing the efficient hierarchy structure and configuring the agents who differ in their honesty. If the only role of agents is to report the information to their direct superior,...

The particular point that will be stressed in this paper is that benefits derived from corrupt behaviour depend on institutions devised to discourage it. The analytical framework used to explore the symmetric tragedies of the commons and the anticommons outlined by James Buchaman and Yong J....

This paper presents a participation game experiment to study the impact of uncertainty and costly political participation on the incidence of reform. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) show that uncertainty about who will ultimately gain or lose as a result of a reform can prevent its adoption. We...

Recent terrorist attacks such as the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 have generated new interest in the debate on capital punishment. It has been suggested that support for the death penalty could be higher in the wake of terrorist activity. Using data from the Australian...

We offer a simple general equilibrium model to analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e. shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) will affect the intensity of social conflict over the distribution of resources. Examples of conflict activities range from crime to civil war. We show that...

In this paper we model the interaction between parties and candidates to highlight the mechanisms by which parties selecting candidates may discipline legislators. Parties are long-lived institutions providing incentives to short-lived candidates. Citizens have preferences over a multimentional...

Esteban and Ray (Econometrica 1994) describe a measure of polarization that is closely connected to potential conflict or tension in a society, emphasizing the difference between polarization and inequality. In principle a very highly polarized society may have a low level of inequality...