This paper deals with the precision of auditing standards under a negligence liability system for auditors. Auditing standards such as, e.g., GAAS in the US and GoA in Germany provide rules for judging the auditors' due care and are supposed to serve both descriptive and normative purposes. In...

This paper presents a theoretical model in which governments regulate economic activity and individuals bypass the regulations by paying bribes to the public officials who monitor their businesses; the amount of the bribe is the subject of bargaining. The paper then introduces a policy that...

Escalating penalties for repeat offenders are a pervasive feature of punishment schemes in various contexts, but economic theory has had a hard time rationalizing the practice. This paper reviews the literature on escalating penalties, and then develops a theory based on uncertainty on the part...

How do we make sense of the cross-country heterogeneity in value judgments emerging from international surveys? Our study suggests that the answer needs to go beyond the adaptation of values to existing institutions and should tap into deeper beliefs. In our case, Finnish respondents do support...

This paper presents a model of quantity regulation as a policy variable when regulation enforcement is imperfect. The model provides a counterintuitive result: that equilibrium congestion can become worse as the quantity restriction becomes more severe. Intuitively, stricter regulation makes the...

This paper presents an incomplete contracting model to show how judicial corruption and judicial favoritism can lead to distortions in agents' incentives to invest in relation-specific assets and cause inefficiency. I also show that while an increase in the judge's income always increases...

This paper models the link between teenage delinquency rates and underlying measures of human and social capital and tests its predictions on a large Montreal database. The model allows teenagers to choose among a number of competing time uses, and the empirical work uses binary and ordered...

We analyze whether corporate leniency programs should grant full immunity to the first self-reporting firm regardless of the amount of evidence provided. We distinguish between two firms, one of them providing high and one only low evidence. We show that awarding full amnesty also to the low...

This paper contributes to the interpretation of the standard of proof in criminal trials in two ways. First, it provides a purely utilitarian explanation as to why there are asymmetric costs associated with false convictions and acquittals. It relies on the fact that noncriminals may engage in...

Sunk costs and uncertainty characterize many public policy changes, as well as private investments. The Dixit-Pindyck theory of investment under uncertainty can then be applied to policy reforms, generating a positive option value to delaying a policy reform. The potential to adjust enforcement...