Specialization and trade rest on institutions that protect property rights and enforce agreements. Frequently, in economic analysis institutions are just assumed to exist, or it is implicitly supposed that the political game can establish them. Once this assumption is done, the invisible hand...

This paper examines how Brazilian prosecutors promote compliance with labor and environmental laws while preserving or even enhancing the competitiveness of local firms. In the cases analyzed, prosecutors realize that the bottlenecks that prevent compliance are often located outside the firm and...

This paper investigates the effects of U.S. AD actions on DCs. It first considers administrative actions by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which decides AD margins for countries. It then considers decision making by the U.S. International Trade Commission, which determines injury to domestic...

This paper revisits the effects of a country's institutional framework on individual firms' behavior, in particular focusing on their propensity to comply with legal rules. The theoretical model presented here suggests that these effects may be of paramount significance-contrary to the recently...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a large-scale policy intervention the Street Crime Initiative that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional resources...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...

Law enforcement officers are allowed to exercise a significant amount of street-level discretion in a variety of ways. In this paper, we focus on a particular prominent kind of discretionary behavior by traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets, speed discounting. Officers partially forgive...

This paper uses newly available data to describe the distribution of crime victimization and other criminal activities (including drug trafficking and corruption) around the world. The paper then documents a negative (positive) correlation between measures of criminal activity and happiness and...

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity -country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...