The existing literature on the determinants of terrorism treats terror as a uniform phenomenon and does not distinguish between different types of terror. This paper explicitly addresses the heterogeneity of terror by classifying groups according to their ideologies. We show that the pattern of...

Most insurance companies publish few data on the occurrence and detection of insurance fraud. This stands in contrast to the previous literature on costly state verification, which has shown that it is optimal to commit to an auditing strategy, as the credible announcement of thoroughly auditing...

To explore damage rules' deterrent effect, we use a public good experiment to tailor allowable punishment to rules used in actual civil litigation. The experimental treatments are analogous to: (1) damages limited to harm to an individual litigant, (2) damages limited to harm to a group...

Intellectual property rights are legal constraints that limit entry in industries where incumbentsare innovators. The set of legal constraints is the same for all industries, withoutconsidering that the externalities created by entry are not necessarily negative for the incumbentor that the...

Using the universe of individual asylum cases in the United States from 2000-2004 and a difference-in-differences research design, we test whether Sept. 11, 2001 decreased the likelihood that applicants from Muslim-majority countries were granted asylum. Our estimates suggest that the attacks...

We provide new evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. To do so, we combine temporal variation in international drug prices with new data on spatial variation in opium suitability to examine the effect of opium profitability on conflict in Afghanistan....

We show that laws and institutions that grant creditors stronger enforcement rights and bargaining power upon default increase expected recovery rates on collateral. Using unique data that provides ex-ante appraised liquidation values on secured loans for a single global bank, we estimate...

This article explores the inter-relationship of collective action within the business community, the nature of the political regime and the security of firms' property rights. Drawing on a pair of surveys recently administered in Russia, we present evidence that post-communist business...

This paper tests whether corruption may act as an efficient grease for the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. We analyze the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 54 developed and developing countries. Using...

Using recent pooled data from several developed nations, the paper uniquely examines whether the composition of payment instruments has a bearing on the prevalence of corruption in a country. Our results suggest that the choice of instruments matters. Paper credit transfer transactions are...