This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

In this study, we use two new data sets on crime and victimisation in Argentina. The first of these is province-level official data over the period 1992-2002. The second data set is the crime victimization survey for the city of Buenos Aires and its main surburbs, which has been conducted...

We offer a simple general equilibrium model to analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e. shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) will affect the intensity of social conflict over the distribution of resources. Examples of conflict activities range from crime to civil war. We show that...

This paper empirically estimates a murder supply equation for the United States from 1965 to 2001 within a cointegration and error correction framework. Our findings suggest that any support for the deterrence hypothesis is sensitive to the inclusion of variables for the effect of guns and other...

A possible view of the role of an adjudicator is that it is to obtain the information that is needed to apply a well-articulated legal rule. That is, the task of an adjudicator in a case is to gather and verify the information that is called for to employ a legal rule, but that once the required...

Two main results have been obtained on the literature on contractual solutions to the hold-up problem. First, a contract specifying a price and quantity of the final good to be traded will, fairly generally, induce efficient investments if these are `selfish' in nature, i.e., each party's...

Congress enacted The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 over the protests of small business advocates who claimed that the ADA would trigger a wave of bankruptcies. Although the profitability of firms may suffer from the costs of ADA compliance, no systematic evidence is available. This...

The access pricing problem emerges when a vertically integrated firm (the incumbent) provides an essential service in the upstream market, to an entrant. Both firms produce a final service and compete in the downstream market. The standard treatment of this problem has been to add the access...

One type of regulation that has recently started to attract the attention of policymakers regarding artisanal fisheries is that of Territorial Use Rights (commonly known as TURFs in the literature). TURFs basically consist in the allocation of fishing rights to individuals and/or groups to fish...

We analyze the compliance behavior of the small-scale fishery boat-owners of the Galapagos Marine Reserve. Our empirical analysis considers aspects related to the participatory management system of the reserve as determinant factors of the decision to violate the regulations. The econometric...