This paper studies how punishment for past offenses affects future compliance behavior and isolates deterrence effects mediated by learning. Using administrative data from speed cameras that capture the full driving histories of more than a million cars over several years, we evaluate responses...

We study the impact on road safety of one-day massive speed limit monitoring operations (SLMO) accompanied by media campaigns that announce the SLMO and provide information on the dangers of speeding. Using register data on the universe of police reported accidents in a generalized...

An authority delegates a monitoring task to an agent. It can only observe the number of detected offenders, but neither the monitoring intensity chosen by the agent nor the resulting level of misbehavior. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the implementability of monitoring...

This paper is the first to analyse the three-way relationship among money laundering, anti-money-laundering efforts and corruption. On the one hand, if we assume that the goal of criminals involved in corruption is to minimize the probability of being detected, then corruption represents a...

Adding to the literature on factors driving corruption and bribery, this paper examines the effect of contestability in business operations on bribe solicitations. Contestability undermines bureaucratic rent-seeking potential and this paper tries to capture this empirically using cross-country...

Research in criminology has shown that the perceived risk of apprehension often differs substantially from the true level. To account for this insight, we extend the standard economic model of law enforcement (Becker, 1968) by considering two types of offenders, sophisticates and naïves. The...

This paper uses a multiple indicators and multiple causes (MIMIC) model and estimates the extent of corruption in 30 Chinese provinces from 1995 to 2015. Treating corruption as an unobserved latent variable, the MIMIC results show that both government size and public investment have significant...

In this paper, I empirically investigate the presence of spillover effects resulting from the strengthening of law enforcement against corruption and organized crime in local governments. Specifically, I take advantage of an Italian law that gives power to the central government to replace...

Understanding corruption is at the heart of treating the dysfunctionality of many countries' public sectors. Yet, most corruption research suffers from one common problem: There is no "objective" measure of public-sector corruption for a cross-section of countries. Most studies on the...