Worldwide human trafficking (HT) is the third most often registered international criminal activity, ranked only after drug and weapon trafficking. The aim of the paper is to measure the extent of HT inflows to destination countries. It proposes the application of the Multiple Indicators...

Worldwide human trafficking (HT) is the third most often registered international criminal activity, ranked only after drug and weapon trafficking. The aim of the paper is to measure the extent of HT inflows to destination countries. It proposes the application of the Multiple Indicators...

Using cross-country and Peruvian data, I show that victims of misfortune, particularly crime victims, are much more likely than non-victims to bribe public officials. Misfortune increases victims’ demand for public services, raising bribery indirectly, and also increases victims’ propensity...

In this paper, I examine the role of household income in determining who bribes and how much they bribe in health care in Peru and Uganda. I find that rich patients are more likely than other patients to bribe in public health care: doubling household consumption increases the bribery...

I study data on bribes actually paid by individuals to public officials, viewing the results through a theoretical lens that considers the implications of trust networks. A bond of trust may permit an implicit quid pro quo to substitute for a bribe, which reduces corruption. Appropriate networks...

Sexual activities between consenting adults of the same sex are still criminalized in more than one third of the countries in the world despite a global wave of decriminalization in the past sixty years. This paper empirically investigates the effect of sex ratios, i.e. relative number of men to...

We report results from economic experiments of decisions that are best described as petty larceny, with high school and college students who can anonymously steal real money from each other. Our design allows exogenous variation in the rewards of crime, and the penalty and probability of...

We investigate one possible explanation for observed rates of corrupt behavior namely that individual decision makers who frequently engage in illegal actions may underestimate the overall probability of being caught. This might in particular be true for petty corruption where small amounts of...

Is there a rational component in the decision to commit suicide? Economists have been trying to shed light on this question by studying whether suicide rates are related to contemporaneous conditions. This paper goes one step further: we test whether suicides are linked to forward-looking...

One main motive behind lengthy prison terms for serious crime is to deter potential offenders from engaging in crime. Yet, economic theory predicts that the scope for punishment as acting as a deterrent depends on how much individuals discount future events when balancing the immediate utility...