Over a million people in the United States are employed in private security and law enforcement, yet very little is known about the effects of private police on crime. The current study examines the relationship between a privately-funded university police force and crime in a large U.S. city....

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...

We analyze corruption in law enforcement: the payment of bribes to enforcement agents, threats to frame innocent individuals in order to extort money from them, and the actual framing of innocent individuals. Bribery, extortion, and framing reduce deterrence and are thus worth discouraging....

In an era of scarce public resources, many jurisdictions are being forced to take drastic measures to address severe budgetary constraints on the administration of criminal justice. As prosecutors’ offices around the nation are being scaled back and enforcement priorities are being narrowed,...

This chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law - the use of governmental agents (regulators, inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. The theoretical core of our analysis...

We present a simple model to analyze law enforcement problems in transition economies. Law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidance and a fiscal externality. We analyze two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem. A...

This chapter surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law—the use of governmental agents (regulators, inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. The theoretical core of the analysis addresses the following basic questions: Should...

This essay is a new chapter in An Introduction to Law and Economics (Third Edition, forthcoming 2003). It discusses how the state should determine the length of a jail term to impose on an individual if he has committed a crime and how much to spend on trying to catch criminals. The analysis...

In the economic literature on law enforcement, the distinction between the probability of arrest and the probability of conviction is not explicit. However, detection does not necessarily imply punishment. This paper focuses on proving that punishment cannot be applied without preceding...