More intensive copyright enforcement reduces piracy, raises prices, and lowers consumer surplus. We show that these results do not hold regarding the extent rather than intensity of enforcement. When enforcement is targeted at high-value buyers such as corporate and government users, the...

We conduct a field experiment to examine whether the deterrent effect of law enforcement can be strengthened by making law enforcement activities more salient. Our focus is on illegal disposal of household garbage in residential areas. At a random subset of 56 locations in a city in the...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, employees with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...

Criminal law enforcement depends on the actions of public agents such as police officers, but the resulting agency problems have been neglected in the law and economics literature (especially outside the specific context of corruption). We develop an agency model of police behavior that...

Corporate governance frameworks in the Middle East and North Africa region have undergone a substantial evolution in the past decade. Better enforcement of corporate governance rules and regulations has in the past three years emerged as both a policy challenge and a priority for the region....

Rules of consumer protection or fair competition can be publicly or privately enforced. We consider the possibility of false advertising by a firm in duopolistic competition where consumers can be distinguished according to whether or not they form rational beliefs about the trustworthiness of...

This article employs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework to examine asymmetric information and limited contract enforcement in financial markets, where firms have access to both internal and external sources of finance. It considers limited enforcement of financial contract in the...

This paper studies how punishment for past offenses affects future compliance behavior and isolates deterrence effects mediated by learning. Using administrative data from speed cameras that capture the full driving histories of more than a million cars over several years, we evaluate responses...

We study the impact on road safety of one-day massive speed limit monitoring operations (SLMO) accompanied by media campaigns that announce the SLMO and provide information on the dangers of speeding. Using register data on the universe of police reported accidents in a generalized...

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...