This paper examines the main determinants of firms tax evasion and corruption in the formal industrial sector. In our model psychological morale of bureaucratic agents are important to explain corruption.It is shown that the presence of rents linked to favoritism and patronage practices is...

We present a new welfare-based framework for optimally choosing legal standards in a variety of regulatory contexts. We formalise the decision-theoretic considerations widely discussed in the existing literature by capturing the quality of the underlying analysis and information available to a...

A recent phenomenon in competition policy is the acquisition of a private firm by an enterprise that is either wholly owned by government or in the midst of privatization. Such an acquisition poses the question of how public ownership may alter the incentives of a firm to engage in...

State regulation of insurance companies has been criticized for many years because of the burden imposed on insurers by having to comply with the laws of many jurisdictions. These higher costs are passed on to consumers. The problems with the current regulatory structure are prompting calls for...

In 2003 China posted its highest economic growth rate in seven years, a robust 9.1 percent. Today the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) dwarfs by more than eight fold its level of 1978, the year China began taking its first tentative steps away from a centrally-planned communist economy...

Mergers, acquisitions and takeovers often imply dramatic changes for employees, competitors, customers and suppliers. Not surprisingly, the market for corporate control has generated controversy and is frequently regulated by law or business custom. Though transfers of control take place in many...

We use event-time methodology to study legal insider trading associated with mergers circa 1900. For mergers with quot;prospectivequot; disclosures similar to today's, we find substantial value gains at announcement, implying participation by quot;outsidequot; shareholders despite the absence of...

Efforts to recapitalize banks in the current crisis have to date been focused on government assistance under the TARP, rather than private investment, and on bank holding companies, rather than banks. We describe three alternative or complementary approaches designed to lower the cost of bank...

This paper examines the factors that affect the decision of U.S. companies to issue securities off-shore compared with inside the United States. Utilizing a data set of 1,444 domestic private placements and offshore offerings from 1993 to 1997, the paper reports that firms that experienced a...