This paper contains the chapters on public enforcement of law and on criminal law from a general, forthcoming book, Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law (Harvard University Press, 2003). By public law enforcement is meant the use of public law enforcement agents - such as police, tax...

Can the market provide law enforcement? This paper addresses this question by examining an historical case-study: the system of private prosecutions that prevailed in England prior to the introduction of the police. Using a model of the market for crime, I examine why this system came under...

A series of multi-group assessments of the structural model produced evidence that collusion was perceived as being the highest risk factor of all. The results for the 122 non-auditor respondents, drawn from the justice institutions, indicated that the direct links from opportunity (for fraud),...

The need for prospective beneficiaries to “take up” new programs is a common stumbling block for otherwise well-designed legal and policy innovations. I examine the take-up problem in the context of publicly provided court services and test the effectiveness of various outreach strategies...

This paper evaluates the impacts of increased coordination, accountability, and leadership among teams of responsible public officials, with evidence from homicide investigations in Colombia. We randomly assigned the investigations of 66% of the 1,683 homicides occurring in Bogotá, Colombia,...

Recent years have seen a rediscovery of the fact that a healthy financial and economic system cannot be based on the lowest common behavioural denominator of what is technically permissible under the black letter of the law. Something more is needed – variously described as ‘sound culture',...

Why was economic development retarded in the Middle East relative to Western Europe, despite the Middle East being far ahead for centuries after the fall of Rome? A theoretical model inspired and substantiated by the history of interest restrictions suggests that this outcome emanates in part...

The 2006 FIFA World Cup was a disappointing display of soccer, comprising forgettable athletic contests that turned most critically on the administration of justice. Referees, more than athletes, emerged as the central protagonists in each game by providing the most dramatic plot twist - either...

As the modern workplace increasingly adopts technology, that technology is being used to surveil workers in ways that can be highly invasive. Ostensibly, management uses surveillance to assess workers’ productivity, but it uses the same systems to, for example, map their interpersonal...

Both a general description of the person and a special case of management of human activities have been developed. The information space for describing of a person’s behavior and activity is constructed. A classification for control objectives is constructed: a goal’s space for head is...