The paper studies the impact of corruption threat in procurement an dpublic purchases. It explores the consequences of the unobservability of people integrity and considers the problem of both capture and extortion. It shows that extortion is not fight against because it is not harmful to the...

This essay investigates the relation between legal and economic development in the PRC. It focuses on the period after the introduction of economic reforms in 1978. The political development in the PRC prior to 1978 left little room for legal development outside the realm of politics. In fact,...

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change, labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT adoption is associated with increased administrative and organizational...

In many economic environments agents make costly and irreversible investments (in "guns") that may enhance their respective threat payoffs but also shrink the utility possibilities set. In such settings, with variable threats and a variable utility possibilities set, it becomes possible to rank...

To facilitate the study of contests in general equilibrium, we examine winner-take-all contests in which the prize is complemenatry to the effort of the contestants, as inputs are in production functions or final goods in utility functions. We focus on the effects of technological factors and...

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less devastating and less attractive to terrorists through...

In recent years the topic of corruption has attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence about the determinants of corruption at the micro level. Therefore we explore in detail the impact of political interest using three different proxies....

Law backed by non-deterrent sanctions (mild law) has been hypothesized to achieve compliance because of norm activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild law in the provision of public goods by comparing it to severe law (deterrent sanctions) and no law. The results show that...

This paper studies the evolutions of tax morale in Spain in the post-Franco era. Tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, might be a key determinant of the actual degree of tax compliance in a country. But despite its potential significance, most studies in the previous...

This paper has a novel framework analysing what shapes superstition in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that socio-demographic and socio-economic variables matter. The results also indicate that there is a certain concurrence between churches and superstitious beliefs. In most of...