We estimate a structural model of borrowing and lending in the illegal money lending market using a unique panel survey of 1,090 borrowers taking out 11,032 loans from loan sharks. We use the model to evaluate the welfare effects of alternative law enforcement strategies. We find that a large...

I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities' surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto theft. Starting in 2014, many municipalities...

We study how the political cost of enforcing a lockdown in response to the COVID- 19 outbreak relates to citizens' propensity for altruistic punishment in Italy, the early epicenter of the pandemic. Approval for the government's management of the crisis decreases with the amount of the penalties...

The legal order is the legitimate foundation of liberal democracy. Its incomplete enforcement of the law can therefore appear dysfunctional, reflecting weak institutions, state capture, and corrupt practices. This paper casts doubt on such categorical assessments by systematically examining the...

This paper shows that judicial enforcement has substantial effects on firms' decisions with regard to their employment policies. To establish causality, I exploit a reorganization of the court districts in Italy involving judicial district mergers as a shock to court productivity. I find that an...

This paper studies how punishment for past offenses affects future compliance behavior and isolates deterrence effects mediated by learning. Using administrative data from speed cameras that capture the full driving histories of more than a million cars over several years, we evaluate responses...

Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty...

We estimate a structural model of borrowing and lending in the illegal money lending market using a unique panel survey of 1,090 borrowers taking out 11,032 loans from loan sharks. We use the model to evaluate the welfare effects of alternative law enforcement strategies. We find that a large...

As in many other sectors of EU economies, 'artificial intelligence' (AI) has entered the scene of the financial services industry as a game-changer. Trading on capital markets is undoubtedly one of the most promising AI application domains. A growing number of financial market players have in...

Offshoring continues to be an important dimension of firms' internationalization choices. However, offshoring also increases contract enforcement costs by inhibiting the coordination and monitoring of performance. Immigrant employees may reduce such costs through their specific knowledge of the...

This paper examines the effect of firms' lobbying activities on penalties received from public competition authorities. For an average sanctioned firm, our model indicates that one additional dollar in lobbying yields to a decrease in cartel sanction of 3.12 dollars. We also observe that cartel...

This article offers a reappraisal of a pair of remarkably contemporary enforcement actions brought by the Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) against copyists of his work. These cases have long been debated by art, cultural and copyright historians insofar as they appear to...

This paper examines the procedure of enforcement of intellectual property rights and WTO activities. But first it will enlighten the readers about the concept of Intellectual property and the rights attached to it. Also, different types of intellectual property has been discussed in this paper...

Public enforcement of law relies on the use of public agents, such as judges, to follow the law. Are judges motivated only by strategic interests and ideology, as many models posit, rather than a duty to follow the law? We use the random assignment of U.S. Federal judges setting...

The power of the platform’s providers such as Amazon, Google Play or Booking is still rising and the existing standard EU antitrust rules do not seem to be sufficient. Consequently, the P2B Regulation, a new complementary regulation, was adopted. In addition to the regulation from above,...

Telecommunications in South Africa is one example of the regulatory state, dating from the early 1990s and comprising the usual elements of commercial operators, ministers issuing periodic policies, a regulator, a competition authority, systems of appeal, and parliamentary oversight. Less...

Appellate courts sometimes issue inconsistent decisions. Individual judges are sometimes inconsistent too. We argue that making judges more consistent could exacerbate the problem of inconsistent courts. We do so through a variant of Arrow's model of preference aggregation in which preferences...

Many new blockchain applications rely on the “stake-and-slash” mechanism to align incentives. We point out that the design of such “contracting” problems can not be detached from the details of the decentralized consensus formation process. To illustrate our theoretical argument, we...

The effects of monopoly power or mergers on incentives to innovate are important issues for antitrust enforcement, but they receive relatively little attention in litigated cases compared to the analysis of predicted effects on prices. This paper reviews what is known about the relationship...

In a monetary model based on Lagos and Wright (2005) where unsecured credit and money are used as means-of-payments, we analyse how the cost and quality of the record-keeping technology affect welfare. Specifically, monitoring agents’ debt repayment is costly but is essential to the use of...

The queries and contentions regarding the place of the enforcer principle in common law jurisdictions such as that of the United Kingdom have been orphaned in a conceptual pandemonium, bringing about an identity crisis to the realm of Trusts & Equity. Debates as to what constitutes the kernel of...

Antitrust jurisdictions all over the world are looking at new rules for digital markets to manage possible forms of monopolization because the consumer welfare standard would be ill-adapted to ensure competition in digital platforms. This paper proposes a different solution by exploring a...

Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. We investigate the political causes of this decline by looking at who made the crucial decisions and how strong a popular mandate they had to do so. Using a novel framework to understand the determinants of regulatory and...

Empirical evidence on the effect of the inspection activities conducted by the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment is rare. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that inspection activities reduce the child labor rate in Brazilian states. To reach that conclusion, we used aggregate data...

In this paper, I investigate whether prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) affects the level of investment of targeted firms and their peers in the same industry. I find that peer firms decrease the level of their investment once they become aware of the opening of an FCPA...

This paper investigates the relationship between the franchise and law enforcement practices using evidence from the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. We find that, following the VRA, black arrest rates fell in counties that were both covered by the legislation and had a large number of newly...

This article reports the results of a study of compliance programs introduced or amended in response to enforcement by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), whether required by court order or as part of an enforceable undertaking (EU). Most of the compliance programs...

How does patent enforcement affect subsequent innovation? I exploit patent infringement litigation in the United States to analyze the effect of patent enforcement on cumulative innovation. The results imply that subsequent innovation increase after a case is filed in a court. While there is a...

This paper analyzes the choice between quality improvements and copyright litigation by a proprietary seller who faces a competitive threat from a content-sharing platform. The platform operates like a "public good" with contributors who share content and free-riders who only consume content...

When labor and management representatives enter into negotiations over a dispute, it is with the understanding that the process may not result in agreement between the parties. When the negotiations break down, the dispute often takes the form of economic warfare: a strike against the employer...

While there are various studies on the relationship between law enforcement and tax compliance, a study that empirically examines the relationship between them within an actual tax administration’s strategy map is lacking in the literature. In response, we set out to examine an identified...

The award of almost ten billion dollars in damages against Nigeria for breach of its contract with P&ID and the leave granted by an English Court to enforce the judgment against Nigeria raises current issues of the practicality of enforcement of a judgment. In answering the question, we, having...