We conducted an experiment with 182 inmates from a maximum security prison to analyze the impact of criminal identity salience on cheating. The results show that inmates cheat more when we exogenously render their criminal identity more salient. This effect is specific to individuals who have a...

I present the following proposal: information revealed during non-cartel investigations by competition law enforcement authorities, such as evaluation of M&As or investigation of monopolization (dominance) conduct, should be directly used to investigate and prosecute cartels. Currently, in...

Although an overwhelming proportion of all legal disputes end in settlement, the determinants of the timing of settlement remain empirically underexplored. We draw on a novel dataset on the duration of commercial disputes in Slovenia to study how the timing of settlement is shaped by the stages...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected...

We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed...

This paper investigates how different damage rules in patent infringement cases shape competition when intellectual property rights are probabilistic. I develop a simple model of oligopolistic competition to compare two main liability doctrines that have been used in the US to assess...

We analyze the design of legal principles and procedures for court decision-making in civil litigation. The objective is the provision of appropriate incentives for potential tort-feasors to exert care, when evidence about care is imperfect and may be distorted by the parties. Efficiency is...

Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a politicaleconomic...

This paper offers a new argument for why a more aggressive enforcement of minor offenses ( zero-tolerance') may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both minor offenses and more severe crime. We develop a model of criminal subcultures in which people gain social status among their peers...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...