This article analyzes corruption of law enforcement agents: payment of bribes to agents so that they will not report … violations. Corruption dilutes deterrence because bribe payments are less than sanctions. The state may not be able to offset … detect and penalize corruption. At the optimum, however, corruption may not be deterred. Nonetheless, it may be desirable to …

bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private … corruption of their subordinates as a byproduct of their efforts to implement their preferences using tax revenue. Within this …

Bureaucratic quality in terms of the level of corruption varies widely across countries, and is in general slow to …. In this paper, we study the possibility that quality of bureaucracy may be an important structural determinant of open … that delivers such a result. Bureaucratic corruption translates into reduced ability by the government to collect tax …

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 … examine a variety of extensions of the central theory, concerning accidental harms, costs of imposing fines, errors, general …