This paper analyzes whether the behavior of potential offenders can be guided by information on the actual detection probability transmitted by the policy maker. It is established that, when viewed as a cheap-talk game, the existence of equilibria with information transmission depends on the...

Almost fifty years ago in 1965, on the steps of the State Capital in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked a crowd of twenty-five thousand "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?" The...

Monetary sanctions are less effective when agents cannot afford to pay them in full. We present a simple model of a society with two types of risk averse agents, differing in terms of productivity in the legal labor market. We consider transfers from the most productive to the least productive...

This note reviews May 2019 OECD framework agreement report, “OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS: Progress Report July 2018-May 2019” on international taxation of the ‘digital economy'. The core conclusions of the review are:1. The framework agreement proposals to-date represent complex,...

In this article I examine the social desirability of rewarding prisoners for good behavior, either by reducing their sentences (granting “time off”), converting part of their sentences to a period of parole, or providing them with privileges in prison. Rewarding good behavior reduces the...

In this article we derive the mix of criminal sanctions—choosing among prison, parole, and probation—that achieves any target level of deterrence at least cost. We assume that prison has higher disutility and higher cost per unit time than parole and probation and that potential offenders...

Each year, the government loses hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue due to underreporting by individual taxpayers. According to standard deterrence theory, policymakers should be able to reduce tax evasion by increasing tax penalties, raising the audit rate, or some combination of the...

This article translates and extends Becker (1968) from public law enforcement to private litigation by examining optimal legal system design in a model with private suits, signals of case strength, court error, and two types of primary behavior: harmful acts that may be deterred and benign acts...

This paper analyzes whether the behavior of potential offenders can be guided by information on the actual detection probability transmitted by the policy maker. It is established that, when viewed as a cheap-talk game, the existence of equilibria with information transmission depends on the...

This article considers the social desirability of prison work programs in a model in which the function of imprisonment is to deter crime. Two types of prison work programs are studied — voluntary ones and mandatory ones. A voluntary work program is socially beneficial: if prisoners are paid a...