In this paper, I empirically investigate the presence of spillover effects resulting from the strengthening of law enforcement against corruption and organized crime in local governments. Specifically, I take advantage of an Italian law that gives power to the central government to replace...

We conduct experimental games with police applicants in Germany to investigate whether intrinsically motivated agents self-select into public service. Our focus is on trustworthiness and the willingness to enforce norms as key dimensions of intrinsic motivation in the police context. We find...

To enforce regulations, governments often delegate power to public officials. However, officials may have incentives to abuse their discretionary power and engage in bribery or extortion. Efforts to monitor and curb such abuses have inspired interest in using new communication technologies to...

We conduct a field experiment to examine whether the deterrent effect of law enforcement can be strengthened by making law enforcement activities more salient. Our focus is on illegal disposal of household garbage in residential areas. At a random subset of 56 locations in a city in the...

Research in criminology has shown that the perceived risk of apprehension often differs substantially from the true level. To account for this insight, we extend the standard economic model of law enforcement (Becker, 1968) by considering two types of offenders, sophisticates and naïves. The...

The administration of tax policy has shifted its focus from enforcement to complementary instruments aimed at creating a social norm of tax compliance. In this paper we provide an analysis of the effects of the dissemination of information regarding the past degree of tax evasion at the social...

For centuries, defaulting governments were immune from legal action by foreign creditors. This paper shows that this is no longer the case. Building a dataset covering four decades, we find that creditor lawsuits have become an increasingly common feature of sovereign debt markets. The legal...

Economic and social interaction takes place between individuals with heterogeneous characteristics. We investigate experimentally the emergence and informal enforcement of different contribution norms to a public good in homogeneous and different heterogeneous groups. When punishment is not...

Although legal sanctions are often non-deterrent, we frequently observe compliance with ‘mild laws'. A possible explanation is that the incentives to comply are shaped not only by legal, but also by social sanctions. This paper employs a novel experimental approach to study the link between...