We present here a case study of successful institutional change in the 1950s Los Angeles Police Department in which Police Chief William H. Parker produced a stunning record of effective reforms. Parker used a combination of institutional reforms that economists can view as changes in...

There is an ongoing literature in economics examining the deterrent effect of police officers on criminal activity. However, this literature tends to focus on the aggregate number of officers employed versus the relative allocation of an officer's time. In this paper, we examine how the...

This study examines how bribery influences bank debt ratios for a large sample of firms in 14 transition countries. We combine information on bribery practices from the BEEPS survey with firm-level accounting data from the Amadeus database. Bribery is measured by the frequency of extra...

Les dispositions spéciales relatives a la compétence des tribunaux réglementent les situations dans lesquelles, au-dela de la demande principale, on a formé plusieurs catégories de demandes: accessoires, additionnelles et incidentes. La regle applicable sera celle de la solution de ces...

This paper will examine the US government’s proposed changes to the H-1B visa, a dual-intent visa meant to bring highly-skilled individuals to the US labor market. It will first explain what the H-1B visa is and is not and what might happen to the H-1B visa in the future. The focus of the...

We consider situations where legal liability yields insufficient incentives for socially efficient behavior, e.g., individuals who cause harm are not always sued or are unable to pay fully for harm done. Some individuals nevertheless behave efficiently because of intrinsic prosocial concerns....

A dramatic rise in arrest rates for girls over the past decade has led to an increasing interest in understanding gender differences in the risk factors that are associated with delinquency. Moreover, the call has been made for the implementation of gender-specific or gender-responsive...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We first consider the case an elected...

The international protection regime of refugee, stateless and displaced women and girls has significant deficiencies. As refugees and displaced persons, women and girls experience unique challenges. They suffer abuse disproportionately as women through rape, human trafficking, and female genital...

This paper assesses how legal origin influences financial development through regulation quality and the rule of law. It employs all the dimensions identified by the Financial Development and Structure Database of the World Bank. The law channels are instrumented with legal origins to account...