Tacit collusion reduces welfare comparably to explicit collusion but remains mostly unaddressed by antitrust enforcement which greatly depends on evidence of explicit communication. We propose to target specific elements of firms’ behavior that facilitate tacit collusion by providing...

A model emphasizing cookie-jar earnings management and the effect of auditor-required adjustment is formulated, with the optimal misreporting strategy generally characterized and the closed-form solutions for particular functional form assumptions derived. Using simulation results based on the...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between fiscal illusion and the shadow economy for 104 countries over the period 1989–2009. We argue that both unobservable phenomena are closely linked to each other, as the creation of a fiscal illusion may be helpful if...

Terrorism has emerged as a major threat to the contemporary society. Nation States are reliant on their counter-terrorism laws for checking terrorism and deterring terrorists. To understand the effectiveness of these counter terrorism laws, it is important to first understand the behaviour of...

This paper modifies a standard model of law enforcement to allow for learning by doing. We incorporate the process of enforcement learning by assuming that the agency’s current marginal cost is a decreasing function of its past experience of detecting and convicting. The agency accumulates...

The proposed theoretical work introduces the basic insights of the ‘slippery slope’ framework into the benchmark macroeconomic model of the labour market in order to study the relation between tax compliance (both voluntary and enforced), tax evasion and unemployment. This paper shows that...

Sexual assault and rape are among the least reported crimes in the United States. This paper hypothesizes that this reflects the psycho-social costs of reporting a rape or sexual assault, which, in turn, reflect the stigma suffered by rape and sexual assault victims. These costs will be highest...

Purpose – Poverty and inequality undoubtedly remain substantial challenges to economic and human developments amid growing emphasis on IPRs (with recent advances in ICTs) and good governance. In the first empirical study on the incidence of piracy on inequality in Africa, we examine how a...

This paper assesses the relevance of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the knowledge economy (KE)-finance nexus using the four variables identified under the World Bank’s knowledge economy index (KEI) and seven financial intermediary dynamics of depth, efficiency, activity and size. Three...