We experimentally study the common wisdom that money buys political influence. In the game, one lobbyist has the opportunity to influence redistributive tax policies in her favor by transferring money to two competing candidates. The success of the lobbying investment depends on whether or not...

Corporate and securities laws are seen to mitigate corporate fraud by 'manipulating the incentives of agents': presenting corporate agents with a probability of being caught and punished if they commit fraud. This article suggests that the same laws also affect corporate fraud in a significant...

Parliamentary oversight of executive discretionary spending is increasingly becoming a mere formality. Nowhere is there greater scope for alleged and actual corruption than in the case executive discretionary spending. Both Jamaica and Belize have embarked on an experiment of parliamentary...

The notion of software code replacing legal code as a mechanism to control human behavior – “code as law” – is often illustrated with examples in intellectual property and freedom of speech. This Article examines the neglected issue of the impact of “code as law” on privacy. To what...

Conventional wisdom dictates that the Internet is a medium in which federalism is destined to fail. By virtue of its decentralized design, the Internet naturally resists regulation by a diverse set of government actors. Indeed, courts have reasoned that federalism on the Internet is either...

The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between...

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level empirical evidence regarding the determinants of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the effects of political interest on corruption despite the...

Estimating the effect of violent forms of political protest on protest success is complicated by endogeneity and omitted variable bias. In this work, I utilize instrumental variables methods to estimate the causal effect of violent protest on the likelihood that protesters win policy...

Many scholars argue that "retrospective voting" is a powerful information shortcut that offsets widespread voter ignorance. Even relatively ignorant voters, it is claimed, can punish incumbents for bad performance and reward them if things go well. But if voters' understanding of which officials...