This paper is the first to analyse the three-way relationship among money laundering, anti-money-laundering efforts and corruption. On the one hand, if we assume that the goal of criminals involved in corruption is to minimize the probability of being detected, then corruption represents a...

When Legislators introduce laws that award amnesties to 'low-rank' criminals co- operating with the justice, top criminals may bribe public officials to subvert the law. Legislators should anticipate this reaction and fight it back by introducing policies that bundle amnesties for low-rank...

Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...

In major legal orders such as UK, the U.S., Germany, and France, bribers and recipients face equally severe criminal sanctions. In contrast, countries like China, Russia, and Japan treat the briber more mildly. Given these differences between symmetric and asymmetric punishment regimes for...

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona and New...

We study a model that establishes a novel theoretical rationale for the empirically well-documented relation between inequality and corruption. According to our model, inequality can nurture corruption by empowering organized crime because collusion between local police forces and criminal...

The efficacy and fairness of cash bail in promoting public safety has been a prominent policy question in recent years, but it is difficult to rigorously estimate the effects of bail, particularly at the state level, because of a lack of exogenous variation. California responded to the COVID...

"Right to Buy" (RTB) was a large-scale UK housing policy whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy their properties at heavily subsidised prices. The policy increased the national homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. A key feature of RTB is...

Incarceration is a crucial part of the scholarly analysis of crime, but what happens inside penal institutions largely remains a 'black box' (Western, 2021). This paper studies the impact of the new psychoactive substances (NPS) epidemic within prisons. NPS are powerful addictive chemical...