An arbiter can decide a case on the basis of his priors or he can ask for further evidence from the two parties to the conflict. The parties may misrepresent evidence in their favour at a cost. The arbiter is concerned about accuracy and low procedural costs. When both parties testify, each of...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Two politicoeconomic equilibria arise from our model, one with little protection of insiders on capital and labor markets, and another one with...

This paper shows that participation in crime and involvement with the criminal justice system has reached extraordinary levels among young men. With approximately 2 percent as many men incarcerated as in the labor force, the crime rate should have plummeted. It didn't. Evidence suggests that the...

Assuming a risk of innocent conviction and fully rational individuals, the current study addresses the effects of immediate punishment and probation rules. Strict dominance of a probation rule requires that the judicial system is highly unreliable and, at the same time, learning over criminal...

This paper uses panel data from African countries and a dynamic panel estimator to investigate the effects of corruption on economic growth and income distribution. I find that corruption decreases economic growth directly and indirectly through decreased investment in physical capital. A unit...

Le blanchiment d’argent progresse dans les mêmes proportions que les crimes et délits qui l’alimentent. L’argent noir, c’est 1 500 Md$, l’argent gris 4 500 Md$ par an, soit au total 20 % du PIB mondial, qu’il faut en grande partie blanchir. Face à ce fléau, les institutions...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a large-scale policy intervention - the Street Crime Initiative - that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional...