We use university parking permits to study how firms and employees split the value of employee benefit tax subsidies. Starting in 1998, the IRS allowed employees to pay for parking passes with pre-tax income. This subsidized the parking pass purchases of faculty and staff, but did not affect...

We investigate the effects of restrictive asylum policies on the number and group composition of asylum seekers. We model the choices of refugees and traffickers about whether to migrate and to apply for asylum. Counter-intuitively, restrictive asylum policies do not lead to a reduction in the...

By reinterpreting Savage's axioms as axioms of the social rationality over resource allocations, we derive a social welfare function encompassing individual social values and a social attitude towards distributional inequality. Wealth maximization becomes the purpose of law only if individuals...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups perform some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected to...

This paper criticizes multicausal and penal impunity explanations of violence and crime. It shows the analytical limits of identifying state and social institutional failure with objective causes of violence. But also highlights that impunity indicators cannot be confused with impunity itself....

We document the existence of a gubernatorial election cycle in state executions, suggesting that election year political considerations play a role in determining the timing of executions. Our analysis indicates that states are approximately 25 percent more likely to conduct executions in...

This paper investigates causalities between small businesses and the shadow economy in ten New Member States of the European Union in the years 2000–2005. The transition from a centrally planned to a market economy, with deregulation and privatization of economic activities, has yielded new...

Worldwide human trafficking (HT) is the third most often registered international criminal activity, ranked only after drug and weapon trafficking. The aim of the paper is to measure the extent of HT inflows to destination countries. It proposes the application of the Multiple Indicators...

Este artículo constata que en Colombia hoy se cuestiona la división de poderes clásica y que las altas Cortes, en especial la Corte Constitucional, tienden a impulsar las políticas públicas y a intervenir en su diseño y aplicación. Primero define qué es la política pública, y presenta...

The notion of a transnational law has been under dispute for several decades. After Philip Jessup in his widely-known Storrs Lecture on Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School had coined the phrase in 1956, it has been used in numerous contexts. One of the most influential narratives of...