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 …

obstacles associated with corruption and weak institutions. We model these circumstances in a principal-agent framework with … economic corruption as an indicator of the strength of property right enforcement within a given country. We compare corruption … levels for a large cross section of countries in 1989 to subsequent FDI flows from 1990 to 1999. We find that corruption is …

puzzle in standard economic models. To study this phenomenon, we propose a positive theory of IEAs in which the political … (might not be implemented in full). The theory also provides a new perspective for understanding investments in green …

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 …