This paper studies how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures and settlement requests are higher for more spiteful...

Federal and state governments often differ in the capacity to pre-commit to expenditure and tax policy. Whether the implied sequence of public decisions has any efficiency implications is the subject of this paper. We resort to a setting which contrary to most of the literature does not exhibit...

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...

The European economic integration leads to increasing mobility of factors, thereby threatening the stability of social transfer programs. This paper investigates the possibility to achieve by means of voluntary matching grants both the optimal allocation of factors and the optimal level of...

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...

After 162 years of political unification, Italy still displays large regional economic differences. In 2019, the per capita GDP of Lombardia was 39,700 euros, but Calabria’s per capita GDP was only 17,300 euros. We build a two-region, two-sector model of the Italian economy to measure the...

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal federalism on income inequality and redistribution. Theoretically contradicting arguments ask for empirical evidence to obtain a better knowledge of this relationship. We rely on the institutional setting in Switzerland to study the issue empirically....