This paper explores the relationship between the intensity of competition in product markets and firms' incentives to lower their production costs by illegal means. Our framework combines a Salop circle with a crime model la Becker, allowing us to differentiate between several measures for the...

This paper studies the effect of news media on the probability of resignation from office of politicians being subject to criminal investigation. Using data on cases in which the political immunity of German representatives was lifted, we find that resignations are more common when the media...

In modern societies today complete legal descriptions of criminal offenses, related to the illegal audit of public revenues usually appear as tax evasion, customs fraud and smuggling. It will be the crime of smuggling phenomenon, as one of the forms of illegal evasion of public revenue,...

We investigate one possible explanation for corrupt behavior namely that individual decision makers who engage frequently in illegal actions might underestimate the overall probability of being caught. This might be in particular true for petty corruption where small amounts of bribes are...

It is the prevailing approach in the public choice literature to model lobbying and corruption in the same manner. On the contrary, we attempt to capture both in the same framework (auction theory), but using different modelling approaches. We present a unified framework in which some...

Do Empires affect human values and behavior long after their demise? In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone border of the Habsburg Empire have been sharing common formal institutions for 90 years now. We exploit this geographic discontinuity in a...

The `Four-Eyes-Principle' (4EP) (business has to be conducted by at least two individuals, hence four eyes) is seen as one of the most potent measures against corruption although it lacks any theoretical or empirical justification. We show in a laboratory experiment that the net effect of the...

In transition and developing countries, we observe rather high levels of corruption even they have democratic political systems. This is surprising from a political economy perspective, as a majority of the people generally suffers from high corruption levels. Our model based on the fact that...

This paper presents an analysis of bureaucratic corruption, income inequality and economic development. The analysis is based on a dynamic general equilibrium model in which bureaucrats are appointed by the government to implement a redistributive programme of taxes and subsidies designed to...