In this paper, we focus on the problem created by asymmetric information about the enforcer's (agent's) costs associated to enforcement expenditure. This adverse selection problem affects optimal law enforcement because a low cost enforcer may conceal its information by imitating a high cost...

As regards to the abrupt growth of crime, it has been analyzed that, only with Becker's (1968) original findings, is not sufficient to prove this phenomena. Thus, many researches have incorporated new paradigms with the intention to explain the mechanisms which react to crime. New research lines...

Policemen are known to support colleagues who are the subject of criminal investigations. While we might expect guilty officers to defend each other, why do law-abiding policemen defend those who have broken the law? We investigate under what conditions it is in the interest of a group to defend...

Rural areas of developing countries often lack effective legal enforcement. However, villagers who know each other well and interact repeatedly may use implicit contracts to minimize crime. I construct a dynamic limited-commitment model in which a thief cannot credibly commit to forego stealing...

The trade-off between the immediate returns from committing a crime and the future costs of punishment depends on an offender’s time discounting. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sentence length generated by a large collective pardon in Italy and provide non-parametric evidence on...

This paper provides a simple model of corruption dynamics with the ratchet effect. As in Shleifer and Vishny [1993], we consider the sale of government property (entry permit) by government officials as the prototype of corruption activities. In a dynamic version of the Shleifer-Vishny model,...

In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium model of crime and show that law enforcement has different roles depending on the equilibrium characterization and the value of social norms. When an economy has a unique stable equilibrium where a fraction of the population is productive and the...