A bilateral danger of underperformance exists when two parties sink investments with payoffs dependent on the behavior of the other. There are five general categories of defense against that danger: (1) Legal action against a misbehaving co-investor; (2) Reliance on a reputation for...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We …rst consider the case of an elected...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We first consider the case an elected...

This paper analyzes the determinants of public law enforcement policies when citizens vote for the timing and level of fi…nes. We consider situations where citizens and politicians disagree on the value of the expected social harm associated with some activities. We fi…nd that citizens vote...

The Russian economy is in transition period "from plan to market", which is characterized by immature institutions and expansion of rent-seeking behavior. In this article, the authors consider rent as a?possible excess return above the minimum income needed to encourage an agent to implement the...

This paper investigates the effect of political factors on safeguards. We present a simple model to show the relationship between political factors and safeguards, and empirically examine whether the Japanese safeguard system was influenced by the political factors. Our empirical analysis shows...

This paper studies how income tax rates are determined and how they are related to government corruption in the form of fund capture. A model is presented where rich voters can block redistribution by buying the votes of some poor voters. In equilibrium there is only limited redistribution and...