Typically, judges retain sentencing discretion in criminal cases, but in some states this discretion is given to juries. One criticism of jury sentencing is that jurors will be tempted to issue "compromise verdicts," where they return a guilty verdict but a light sentence when they are uncertain...

While undercover operations by the police are familiar, the harm they can impose on third parties is not. When government agents impersonate criminals, they can impose personal, physical, financial, and reputational harms on victims wholly unrelated to their criminal investigation. A sham drug...

This paper incorporates the incentives of tax inspectors into an equilibrium model of tax compliance and enforcement when the taxpayers' true income is private information (adverse selection) and the effort of tax inspectors to verify reported income is unobservable (moral hazard). It...

The paper estimates the effects of a simpler criminal procedure on case durations and the probabilities that the defendant is charged and convicted. The identification strategy exploits a policy reform in the Czech Republic as a quasi-natural experiment. The reform allowed petty offenses to be...

The corporate governance literature usually refers to the U.S. enforcement superiority to explain the premium that foreign firms experience when cross-listing in U.S. stock exchanges. This paper casts doubt on this hypothesis by analyzing two comparative case-studies of private and public...

This paper explores the connection between transnational law and policing. Following a brief overview of the global policing field and its relationship with law, we use socio-legal theories of policing to examine four examples of law in action: (i) the global money system, (ii) transnational...

This paper analyzes whether Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed between the United States and Latin American countries during the last decade produced higher enforcement of labor regulations. The paper computes before-after estimates of the effect of FTAs on labor inspections and exploits...

This paper gives an overview about the legal background and the practice of the Hungarian Competition Authority as regards imposing monetary sanctions for misleading advertising and other types of unfair commercial practices. The sometimes unpredictable fluctuation of the level of fines is...

Few Americans would question the appropriateness of assessing criminal sanctions on public officials who accept bribes in exchange for returning influence or power by wrongly capitalizing on their access to government resources. Less clear, is how government officials, federal courts, and...