We consider an economy where property rights are necessary to ensure sufficient rewards to ex ante investments. Because enforcement of property rights influences the ex post distribution of rents there is room for corruption. We characterize the optimal organization of society and the optimal...

This paper investigates the effect of corruption on competition in government procurement auctions. Our assumption is that the bureaucrat (i.e. the agent that administers the market), if corrupt, may provide a favor in exchange for a bribe.

The aim of this paper is to show that both location and race matter for explaining the high criminality rate in cities. In our model, blacks and whites are identical in all respects. However, if, for no economic but for extrinsic reasons, everybody (including blacks) believes that blacks are...

This paper considers a dynamic North South model of international trade and innovations in which firms can endogenously bias the direction of technological change. We show that, when there is a differential degree of protection of property rights between the two regions, innovating firms face a...