The article presents a novel dynamic setting to compare old – usury – and new – cryptocurrency – money laundering techniques and uses it for calibration to shed light on their relative role as an effective device for the criminal organizations to clean their illegal revenues. The...

This paper examines the economy's vulnerability to money laundering in a given region. Assuming that criminals are rational investors who take into account risks and returns of both legal and illegal investments, we define vulnerability as a function of well-identified drivers. Proxies of these...

In advanced economies, the recent collapse of interest rates to the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) has triggered a series of research questions on how to navigate the new zero-interest credit environment. Focusing on illegal markets, it is possible to explain why usury still remains widespread after the...

This study investigates the efficiency of the suspicious transaction reporting (STR) activity to a Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) as a means to deter money laundering (ML). Baseline and two-province theoretical models are used to frame the empirical analysis. The latter examines the...

We investigate the effect of job loss and unemployment benefits on criminal behavior, exploiting individual-level data on the universe of workers and criminal cases in Brazil over the 2009-2017 period. We match workers displaced upon plausibly exogenous mass layoffs with...

I review recent developments in the economic analysis of crime, focusing in particular on organized crime and corruption. I first discuss the main challenges to the empirical identification of causal relationships – namely, measurement error due to endogenous reporting of crime and the fact...

We study the impact of emotions on real-world decisions made by loan officers by analyzing the loan conditions of loans granted immediately after a bank branch robbery. We find significant differences between the conditions of loans granted after a robbery and changes in loan conditions that...

The aim of the paper is to analyze theoretically and empirically the impact the macroeconomic cycle has on the accumulation of capital by organized crime, using estimates for the global drug market. So far the economic literature has neglected the relationships existing between illegal markets,...