Excessive and useless reporting, called “crying wolf effect”, is a crucial shortcoming that any anti-money laundering (AML) design aims to address and fix. For this reason, in these years the AML policy has switched both in the US and in Europe from a rule- to a risk-based approach. This...

This study investigates the efficiency of the suspicious transaction reporting (STR) activity to a Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) as a means to deter money laundering (ML). Baseline and two-province theoretical models are used to frame the empirical analysis. The latter examines the...

This paper examines the economy's vulnerability to money laundering in a given region. Assuming that criminals are rational investors who take into account risks and returns of both legal and illegal investments, we define vulnerability as a function of well-identified drivers. Proxies of these...