In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been growing calls to regularise the status of the over 64,000 undocumented people currently living in Australia without regular immigration status. Australia has previously had three legal immigration amnesties in 1974, 1976 and 1980. Yet, the...

Currently, most jurisdictions around the globe provide victims of cartels a full right of action. However, a few jurisdictions do not provide any right of action to victims (e.g., Pakistan and Sri Lanka), while a few others merely provide victims a follow-on but not standalone right of action...

This paper develops a simple model to explore whether a higher detection probability for offshore tax evaders-e.g., because of improved exchange of information between countries and/or due to digitalization of tax administrations-renders it optimal for governments to introduce a voluntary...

This special issue marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of a leniency program for antitrust in the EU and contains five original papers: Each paper examines the effects of design parameters of leniency programs on their performance. Before introducing each contribution separately, we...

Competition authorities need a better understanding of the determinants of cartel self-reporting in order to increase cartel members’ incentives to apply for the benefit from leniency programs and thus improve the effectiveness of anti-cartel policy. Using information on 683 firm groups that...

This paper examines the effects of a government regularization program offered to half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. For this purpose, 2,232 surveys of refugee families were collected and used to compare refugees who arrived in Colombia around a specified eligibility date in 2018....

This study examines the investment efficiency of firms engaging in tax avoidance in Indonesia. We test 2064 firm-year observations of Indonesian listed firms from 2010-2019 and document a positive relationship between tax avoidance and investment efficiency. This study also considers a unique...

This paper examines the effects of a government regularization program offered to half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. For this purpose, 2,232 surveys of refugee families were collected and used to compare refugees who arrived in Colombia around a specified eligibility date in 2018....

This paper establishes a new fact about immigration policies: legalization has long-term effects on formal employment of undocumented immigrants and their assimilation. We exploit the broad amnesty enacted in Italy in 2002 together with rich survey data collected in 2011 on a representative...

On 1 February 2022, Amnesty International released a comprehensive report claiming that Israel is engaged in apartheid against the Palestinians and is thereby committing a crime against humanity. The Amnesty report is one in a series of publications by Palestinian, Israeli and international...

The leniency program was introduced with the objective of enforcing Competition law and detecting cartels by imposing less or no penalties on companies which provides the Competition Commission with evidence that would have been hard to find merely by investigation. The purpose of the leniency...

Many jurisdictions around the world are promoting private antitrust enforcement. However, currently, the dominant view is that private actions discourage leniency application, an important source for antitrust authorities to detect and combat cartels. Such a view hinders the development of...

We document judicial leniency on defendant birthdays across 5 million decisions. Our results are consistent with reference-dependent social preferences. First, French sentences are 1% fewer and around 5% shorter. Second, U.S. federal judges also round down sentences except when rounding up makes...

We examine how amnesty-based regulatory initiatives affect compliance in the context of the SEC’s 2014 Municipalities Continuing Disclosure Cooperation initiative (MCDC). In an effort to increase transparency in the municipal debt market, the MCDC granted favorable settlement terms to...

This study analysis the implementation of the cartel leniency program by the Competition Commission of India using comprehensive data and finds a distinct lack of a ‘race’ to the agency. We specifically focus on why prima facie findings have not resulted in a ‘shock’ to expected returns...

We provide evidence that anti-collusion leniency legislations around the world reduce IPO underpricing. The effect is amplified (mitigated) among IPOs with more prominent agency concerns (lower level of information asymmetry) and is mitigated in countries with stringent financial reporting...

One of the defining features of EU competition provisions is that they are enforceable and applicable by the authorities and courts of the European Union and those of its Member States. The European Commission and national competition authorities participate in the application of EU competition...

Research on cartel inspection has considered dynamic behaviors of firms but not of the regulator. The current paper allows the antitrust authority to choose the level of cartel monitoring intensity and its dynamic patterns. Specifically, we compare stationary monitoring policies with "switching"...

This paper studies the effectiveness of tax amnesties and their impacts on capital taxation and public spending. We leverage rich policy variation from Argentina, where left- and right-wing governments implemented multiple programmes and achieved varying success. After numerous failed...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...

This paper studies whether undocumented immigrants change their crime-reporting behavior after receiving a regular migratory status. It exploits a natural experiment of a massive amnesty program that gave a regular migratory status to over 281,000 undocumented Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia....

We revisit the pros and cons of cartel criminalization with focus on its possible introduction in the EU. We document a recent phenomenon that we name EU ``leniency inflation", whereby leniency has been increasingly awarded to many, and sometimes all members of a cartel. We argue that, coupled...

This paper analyzes the effect of family ownership on a company’s tax avoidance practices in Indonesia. This study also analyzes whether there is a change in tax avoidance practice after the tax amnesty program implemented in 2015-2016. We used three measurements to capture tax avoidance...

Governments have periodically turned to tax amnesties, as a mechanism used in the frame of their fiscal programs, or partly to activate more capital in the national economy and establishing the fiscal rule to a new higher level. As a non-traditional instrument, it can be used to smooth out...

Exploiting unique datasets covering over 28,000 tax evaders in the Netherlands, we investigate the distribution of tax evasion and its implications for the measurement of wealth inequality. In contrast to Alstadsæter, Johannesen and Zucman (2019), the correction for offshore wealth has only a...

In the face of declining leniency applications, and the risk that that poses to the effectiveness of anti-cartel enforcement, this paper considers the role that competition law specific liability insurance could have on rebalancing the calculation for determining whether to self-report

Cartels are often fought by granting leniency, in the form of forgiveness of penalties, to whistle-blowers. This study employs a laboratory experiment to compare leniency programs that differ with respect to fine size and whether a second whistle-blower may apply for leniency. The results show...

Rebel groups that govern territory require the support of large numbers of civilians. Afterconflict ends, these civilians are often perceived as rebel collaborators. Yet, we know relatively little about what victimized populations think is the appropriate response to collaborators. This gap in...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...

How can the regularization of approximately half a million migrant's impact crime reports in hosting areas? To identify the effects of this large amnesty, we match confidential administrative data on the location of undocumented migrants with department-monthly data from crime reports and...

This study uses an original state-level data set to investigate whether press coverage on trials for tax evasion by celebrities affects the likelihood that other tax payers participate in Germany’s tax amnesty program. To identify the causal effect, we use exogenous variation in the reporting,...

This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and...

We examine the effects of Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus, influencing firms' whistle blowing incentives in one market, on their self-reporting decision in another market. Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus are proactive US strategies which aim at triggering multiple confessions by increasing the...

This report discusses cash bail reforms that have occurred in the United States and provides key considerations for people interested in implementing bail reforms in their jurisdiction. Based on a landscape analysis of bail reforms across all 50 states, we identify the four main actors who take...

In modern economies, when debt and trust issues arise, a partial forgiveness policy is often the solution to induce payment and increase disclosure. For their part, governments around the globe continue to use tax amnesties as a strategy to allow debtors to make amends for past misdeeds in...

Hong Kong’s Competition Commission first introduced its leniency programme in 2015, which allows cartel members to blow the whistle in exchange for immunity from antitrust fines. In late 2020, the Competition Tribunal handed down a judgment in Competition Commission v Quantr Ltd and Cheung Man...