In this paper we investigate the role of judicial control of lobbying activities in an endogenous policy framework, focusing on two dimensions of quality of the judiciary, namely efficiency and integrity. We present a multi-layer lobbying model where a self-interested group is allowed to...

The literature identifies a significant drop in merger control enforcement activity on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade. Furthermore, this drop in enforcement activity is convincingly connected to enforcement problems on the sides of the competition agencies. This paper goes...

The interaction between offenders and potential victims has so far received relatively little attention in the literature on the economics of crime. The main objective of this paper is twofold: to extend the "market for offenses model" to deal with both "product" and "factor" markets, and to...

With the recognition of the need to heighten protection of intellectual property especially with regard to counterfeit trademark and pirated copyrighted goods, the enforcement of intellectual property rights at the borders has emerged as a significant issue in recent times. In view of this, the...

From 1890 into the 1970s competition law in the United States was not economically coherent. As a result, in all but the prosecution of cartels, enforcement was close to random. New business practices were viewed with suspicion, particularly when introduced by large firms, and mergers were...

Even under antitrust enforcement, firms may still form a cartel in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model when the discount factor is sufficiently close to one. We present a linear oligopoly model where the profit-maximizing cartel price converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the...

The Federal False Claims Act serves an important function in detecting and deterring fraud upon the government of the United States. By enlisting the public as private prosecutors in such actions, the statute *678 ensures heightened enforcement and obtains compensation for losses sustained by...

Between 182 BC and 18 BC, Roman lawmakers enacted a series of sumptuary laws regulating banquets (including the number of guests and the consumption of specific foods). Enforcement was hardly successful and these regulations had to be reiterated over time. Traditional explanations based on...

This paper analyzes how the presence of liability dollarization, different degrees of contract enforcement, and the possibility to default on debts affect firms' financing decisions. The framework is a dynamic model of heterogeneous firms. They finance their capital acquisitions using their own...

The adoption of international accounting standards, namely the IFRS, at the country level has sparked two contrasting, but not mutually exclusive, viewpoints. One view is that IFRS engenders better reporting standards and uniform adoption allows for greater comparability. The upshot is that IFRS...