In rapidly changing areas of law, the writing of rules is a challenging issue for lawmakers. Obsolescence impede law to capture the objective of an underlying policy. The legislator, the judge and the regulator are considered as producers of law who have to decide whether or not to invest in a...

This paper presents a general rent-seeking model in which participants decide on entry before choosing their levels of efforts. The conventional wisdom in the rent-seeking literature suggests that the rent dissipation increases with the number of potential participants and with their pro-...

We explore randomizing legal information when it may be infeasible to randomize law per se. If citizens are underinformed about a legal entitlement, randomizing information about the entitlement may yield critical insight into its potential effect. We illustrate with a field experiment with the...

Historically, the authority to conclude international treaties was exclusively exercised by administrative bodies (or the chief of state). However, recent studies pointed out that the present legislative bodies have come to play a more active role through ratification or the review of treaties...

If contract enforcers must be randomly selected from the same population and thus are as opportunistic as ordinary traders could a system of adjudication nevertheless increase the degree to which contractual obligations on large anonymous markets are fulfilled? Adopting an indirect evolutionary...

Auf der Grundlage versicherungsmathematischer Berechnungen wird ein Beitragsmodell für die gesetzliche Rentenversicherung vorgestellt. Es wird untersucht,ob ein grundlegend abweichender Ansatz vom derzeitigen Beitragssystem die Gleichbehandlung in der Altersversorgung stärken sowie Versicherte...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, for the case of Italy, ceteris paribus, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist ones in the short and long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (Crime and Punishment: An Economic...

Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than the rest of us? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound rational choice answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting an...

This study examines the impact of external factors, such as law, regulation, and technology on a country’s rate of economic growth. The results suggest that the technological, legal, and regulatory environment can play a major role towards enhancing the smooth functioning of the financial...

Individuals dominate money in politics, accounting for over 90% of campaign contributions, but studies of individuals’ giving are scarce. We show that individuals increase their personal contributions dramatically when they assume leadership roles at organizations such as labor unions,...