The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

Judicial Independence (JI) as factually implemented varies considerably between countries. Since de iure JI is an imperfect predictor of de facto JI, a number of variables that might determine the factual level of judicial independence is theoretically discussed and empirically tested. A...

Applying the modern Property Rights Approach to depict employment and firm-internal delegation relationships, this paper addresses the question how to prevent corporate bribery. The analysis and the answers that follow take into account interaction effects between firm-internal delegation...

A current U.S. policy is to introduce a new style of currency that is harder to counterfeit, but not immediately to withdrawal from circulation all of the old-style currency. This policy is analyzed in a random-matching model of money, and its potential to decrease counterfeiting in the long run...

I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of per capita murder of Florida State (1933-2005). Separating out “permanent” from “cyclical” murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincide with documented waves of organized crime, internal...

We analyze the political determinants of investor and employment protection. Our model predicts that proportional electoral systems are conducive to weaker investor protection and stronger employment protection than majoritarian systems. This prediction is consistent with international panel...

During the first half of the 1990s a pool of Italian judges carried out an investigation, named Mani Pulite (literally clean hands), that led many public officials to be prosecuted and convicted because of bribery and embezzlement. The impact of Mani Pulite was so much influential that since...

Recent work documents that better legal institutions are associated with broader equity markets. We investigate whether international differences in legal institutions also help explain the international cross-section of expected stock returns. We document three main regularities. First, total...

Looking back upon the centuries one would suspect that in earlier ages universities of medieval France and Italy were very different from the multiplicity of organizational and institutional forms of higher education institutions in modern times, and yet one would be surprised how much these old...

With growing trade in a global economy, the desire for trade protection becomes increasingly important. One aspect of trade protection that has risen to the forefront is the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) across national borders. This article analyzes the determinants of...