Previous studies have proposed a link between corruption and wages in the public sector. This paper investigates this link using a laboratory experiment. In the experiment, public officials have the opportunity to accept a bribe and can then decide between a neutral and a corrupt action. The...

We test economic and sociological theories for the relationship between employment and crime, where social welfare is used as an identifying mechanism. We consider a sample of disadvantaged males from The Netherlands who are observed between ages 18 and 32 on a monthly time scale. We...

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals’ nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 3 million people with German ancestors immigrated to Germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship. Exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic German immigrants by German authorities across regions upon arrival, we find that...

This paper tests the relationship between time preferences and crime rates as posited by Davis (1988), whose theoretical analysis suggests that individuals’ attitude towards the future significantly affects their propensity to commit crime. Our empirical analysis is based on a panel of Italian...

In the last three decades Argentina tripled its crime rate boosting safety at the top of mayor concerns of Argentineans which leaves open the question about the behavior of incumbent governors of the 23 provinces about anti-crime measures in the proximity of elections. How do incumbent governors...

In modern tax systems, firms remit the majority of tax revenues raised by the government, which gives them opportunities to avoid and evade taxes by misreporting their activities. In this paper, we use a natural policy experiment to analyze how firms respond to different tax enforcement regimes....

Corruption in India is ubiquitous and may be broadly identified as illegal and legal. This paper delves into the typology of legal corruption in India, which, apart from abuse of discretionary power, and tactical law and policy making, also includes – not so well documented – use of...

We consider the role of asymmetric information on the emergenceof collusion between criminals and enforcers, in the framework proposed by Bowles and Garoupa (1997) and Polinsky and Shavell (2001). Our paper proposes that the optimal criminal sanction for the underlying o®ense is not necessarily...

While formal institutions are recognized as having an effect on trust formation, no theoretical or empirical models exist to formalize this relationship. This study introduces a new conceptual framework to explain trust building by individuals and the role that formal rules and laws may play in...