Municipalities have revenue motives for enforcing traffic laws in addition to public-safety motives because many traffic offenses are punished via fines and the issuing municipality often retains the revenue. Anecdotal evidence supports this revenue motive. We empirically test the revenue motive...

A country’s political and economic institutions are critical for economic prosperity. The literature abounds with institutional measures, precisely because institutions are multidimensional. We use panel unit root and cointegration tests to examine the time-series properties of several...

Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption? Natural disasters create resource windfalls in the states they strike by triggering federally provided natural-disaster relief. By increasing the benefit of fraudulent appropriation and creating new opportunities for such theft,...