We study the consequences of leniency - reduced legal sanctions for wrongdoers who spontaneously self-report to law enforcers - on sequential, bilateral, illegal transactions, such as corruption, manager-auditor collusion, or drug deals. It is known that leniency helps deterring illegal...

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the deterrence properties of a competition policy regime. On the basis of the economic theory of law enforcement we identify several factors that are likely to affect its degree of deterrence: 1) sanctions and damages; 2) financial and human...

Over a million people in the United States are employed in private security and law enforcement, yet very little is known about the effects of private police on crime. The current study examines the relationship between a privately-funded university police force and crime in a large U.S. city....

Criminal law enforcement depends on the actions of public agents such as police officers, but the resulting agency problems have been neglected in the law and economics literature (especially outside the specific context of corruption). We develop an agency model of police behavior that...

We introduce the possibility of direct punishment by specialized enforcers into a model of community enforcement. Specialized enforcers need to be given incentives to carry out costly punishments. Our main result shows that, when the specialized enforcement technology is sufficiently effective,...