NREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) is the Indian government's flagship anti-poverty program and is one of the largest public works programmes in the world which aims to increase employment opportunities for the poor and in particular, improve women's access to the...

We show the effects of entry by a non-innovating firm on the innovating firms' incentive for undertaking cooperative R&D, highlighting the impliations of knowledge spillover. Entry by a non-innovating firm may either increase or decrease the incentive for cooperative R&D comparted to no entry,...

We examine if elections of public prosecutors (as is common in the U.S.) influence the way they handle cases. In particular, does it affect which cases are taken to trial? A theoretical model is constructed where voters use outcomes of the criminal justice system as a signal of prosecutor's...

We examine how socio-economic and police enforcement variables affect property and violent crimes at different points of the crime distribution in England and Wales over the period 1992-2007. By using data from 43 police force areas, we examine how the effect of real earnings, unemployment,...

We analyze the possible impact of re-organizing multiple prosecutors' offices on 'prosecutorial output': merging multiple districts saves on a state's expenditures but the impact on the criminal justice is ambiguous and depends on whether scale efficiencies make up for the diminished resources...

We examine various determinants of property and violent crimes by using police force area level (PFA) data on England and Wales over the period 1992-2008. Our list of potential determinants includes two law enforcement variables, crime-specific detection rate and prison population, and various...

A new explanation for the failure of plea bargaining is provided. It is shown that a retention agent (i.e. median voter) can use convictions at trial as a signal of the quality of a prosecutor. This encourages a public prosecutor to take cases to trial even when both social welfare and her...

We analyze how product quality, prices and demand interact in a dynamic model of asymmetric information. We show that in markets for experience goods, even in the absence of certification, trade may occur, arising from a relation between market thickness and the incentive of sellers to produce...

We provide the first detailed econometric analysis of the impact of sentencing on various types of acquisitive crime (theft, burglary, fraud and robbery) in England and Wales. We examine (a) whether sentencing reduces crime and (b) whether short sentences are more effective than long sentences....

We analyze the Hotelling-Downs model of a winner-take-all elections with sequential entry where n 2 'office-seeking' candidates with privately known qualities arrive in an order to announce platform commitments and voters receive partially informative exogenous signals about quality of each...