Regulation and the negligence rule are both designed to obtain compliance with desired standards of behavior, but they differ in a primary respect: compliance with regulation is ordinarily assessed independently of the occurrence of harm, whereas compliance with the negligence rule is evaluated...

Non-compliance with medication therapy remains an unsolved and expensive problem for health care systems around the world. Yet we know little about the factors that determine a patient's decision to follow treatment recommendations. This study uses a unique panel dataset comprising all...

We study partisan differences in Americans' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and...

How should recipients of publicly-provided goods and services prove their identity in order to access these benefits? The core design challenge is managing the tradeoff between Type-II errors of inclusion (including corruption) against Type-I errors of exclusion whereby legitimate beneficiaries...

This paper explores firms' response to regulatory enforcement. New Source Review, a provision of the Clean Air Act, imposes stringent emissions limitations on significantly modified older power plants. In 1999, the EPA sued owners of 46 plants for NSR violations. We study how electricity...

In recent decades, democratic countries have signed hundreds of international environmental agreements (IEAs). Most of these agreements, however, are weak: they generally do not include effective enforcement or monitoring mechanisms. This is a puzzle in standard economic models. To study this...

This paper presents direct evidence for relational contracts in sovereign bank lending. Unlike the existing empirical literature, its instrumental variables method allows for distinguishing a direct influence of past repayment problems on current spreads (a "punishment" effect in prices) from an...

We study the relationship between the political connections of Chinese firms and workplace fatalities. In our preferred specification we find that the worker death rate for connected companies is two to three times that of unconnected firms (depending on the sample employed), a pattern that...

Comparisons of schools that barely meet or miss criteria for adequate yearly progress (AYP) reveal that some sanctions built into the No Child Left Behind accountability regime exert positive impacts on students. Estimates indicate that the strongest positive effects associate with the ultimate...

This article surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law -- the use of public agents (inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. We first present the basic elements of the theory, focusing on the probability of imposition of...