We study the role of an enforcer in the effectiveness of selective incentives in solving the collective action problem when groups take part in a contest. Cost functions exhibit constant elasticity of marginal effort costs. If prize valuations are homogeneous, our source of heterogeneity induces...

This paper studies the delegation of activities that pose serious risks to health and the environment in an economy regulated by strict liability schemes. Strict liability induces judgment-proof possibilities. Two civil liability regimes are then compared: a strict liability scheme and a capped...

This paper analyzes the difficulties of comparing the respective effectiveness of two among the most important liability regimes in tort law: rule of negligence and strict liability. Starting from the standard Shavellian unilateral accident scheme, I show that matching up liability regime on...

This paper addresses the conditions for setting up strict civil liability schemes. For that it compares the social efficiency of two main civil liability regimes usually enforced to protect the environment: the strict liability regime and the "capped strict liability scheme". First, it shows...

This paper analyzes the meaning of comparing the economic performance of strict liability and negligence rule in a unilateral standard accident model under Knightian uncertainty. It focuses on the cost expectation of major harm on which the injurers form beliefs. It shows first that, when the...

In this paper we build up the analysis of La Porta et al. (1998), to investigate the importance of legal families in explaining the variations in pollution emissions in different countries. The main intuition behind our analysis is that the nations in which the rights of shareholders are more...

In this study we analyze the effects of corruption on income inequality and poverty. Our analysis advances the existing literature in four ways. First, instead of using corruption indices assembled by various investment risk services, we use an objective measure of corruption: the number of...

This study investigates the connection between rent-seeking behaviour, corruption activity and quality of institutions to empirically evaluate the unexpected implications of an energy policy for criminal activity. The object of this research is a program of public subsidies introduced in Italy...

In this paper, we investigate a channel through which social (or civic) capital may improve economic wellbeing and the functioning of institutions: political accountability. The main idea is that voters who share values and beliefs that foster cooperation are more likely to base their vote on...

The determinants of incentive regulation are an important issue in economics. More powerful rules relax allocative distortions at the cost of lower rent extraction. Hence, they should be found where the reformer is more concerned with stimulating investments by granting higher expected profits,...