In an earlier era, treaties of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation (FCNs) were the primary international law mechanism through which the U.S. government sought to promote and protect foreign investment. Conventional wisdom holds that FCNs are of only limited historical interest, having been...

Though now possible, no European state is competing for incorporations, and this is unlikely to happen in a general fashion. In this paper I argue, however, that the possibility of one state competing for one specific segment of the market for incorporations should not be ruled out altogether....

The use of hacking tools by law enforcement to pursue criminal suspects who have anonymized their communications on the dark web presents a looming flashpoint between criminal procedure and international law. Criminal actors who use the dark web (for instance, to commit crimes or to evade...

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...

This paper studies the effects of enforcement on illegal behavior in the context of a large aerial spraying program designed to curb coca cultivation in Colombia. In 2006, the Colombian government pledged not to spray a 10 km band around the frontier with Ecuador due to diplomatic frictions...

Firm informality is pervasive throughout the developing world, Bangladesh being no exception. The informal status of many firms substantially reduces the tax basis and therefore impacts the provision of public goods. The literature on encouraging formalization has predominantly focused on...

In the past three decades, the world has witnessed the fast economic growth of Vietnam, which has become one of the most attractive destinations for foreign direct investment in the region. Vietnam has also actively participated in the world trading system since its successful accession to the...

Licensing promotes technology transfer and innovation, but enforcement of licensing contracts is often imperfect. We model contract enforcement as a game with perfect information but probabilistic enforcement and explore the implications of weak enforcement on the design of licensing contracts,...

In three experiments, we examine how an employer reputation system disciplines an online labor market (Amazon Mechanical Turk) in which employers may decline to pay workers while keeping their work product. These three experiments test the value of the employer reputation system for workers,...

It is widely believed that deterrence constitutes the most important impact of competition policy, but this seems to be largely a matter faith rather than based on any empirical evidence. This paper present a rare attempt to quantify the deterrence effect of cartel policy. It develops a...