Private Enforcement, Corruption, and Antitrust Design

Recent adoption of competition laws across the globe has highlighted the importance of institutional considerations for antitrust effectiveness and the need for comparative institutional analyses of antitrust that extend beyond matters of substantive law. Contributing to the resulting nascent research agenda, we examine how the rationale for enabling versus precluding private antitrust enforcement as one salient choice in antitrust design depends on whether antitrust enforcement is corruption-free or plagued by corruption. Contingent on the nature of adjudicatory bias, bribery either discourages private antitrust lawsuits or incentivizes firms to engage in frivolous litigation. Corruption expectedly reduces the effectiveness of antitrust enforcement at deterring antitrust violations. Yet private antitrust enforcement as a complement to public enforcement can be social welfare-enhancing even in the presence of corruption. Under some circumstances, corruption actually increases the relative social desirability of private antitrust enforcement. Our analysis highlights that the appropriate design of antitrust institutions is context-specific

Corruption and the Balance of Gender Power

This paper seeks to explain the negative relationship between female participation in a government and corruption found in empirical research. We propose that even if there are no innate gender differences towards moral values, the costs of corrupt behavior may still differ across genders and are related to the proportion of female participation in government agencies. Hence, females behave more honestly than males do, not because they are naturally prone to it, but because they cannot afford to be corrupt if they are a minority. In that sense, the total density of corruption is non-monotonic in the proportion of female participation.

Product differentiation, firm heterogeneity and international trade: Exploring the Alchian-Allen effect

In a model of international trade with horizontally differentiated goods, increasing returns and monopolistically competitive markets, this paper proposes that the degree of differentiation in a product mix-defined as the ratio of the number of varieties to the total value of imports-can be regarded as another aspect of quality. Furthermore, this paper draws a parallel to the Alchian-Allen effect and shows that, when firms are heterogeneous in either fixed or variable costs, the degree of differentiation is increasing in per unit transportation costs.Product differentiation Firm heterogeneity International trade Quality

Corruption with Heterogeneous Enforcement Agents in the Shadow Economy

We analyze the relationship between the underground (or shadow) economy and the formal or legal sector in the presence of corruption in both sectors. Firms choose between operating in the legal and in the underground economy. With morally heterogeneous law enforcement agents monitoring the underground economy, the equilibrium in both sectors depends critically on the incentives of honest enforcers and on the proportion of such agents. In particular, we show that an increase in the proportion of honest agents monitoring the shadow economy may have the adverse effect of increasing its size, together with concomitant increases in negative externalities.

Corruption and the Distortion of Law Enforcement Effort

We consider the distortions that corruption generates in law enforcement. Corruption dilutes deterrence, and hence the government needs to adjust law enforcement activities appropriately. We argue that this distortion is not the only one taking place. A misalignment of goals between the government and the enforcers results in another set of agency costs by which activities that put enforcers in direct contact with criminals increase at the cost of other law enforcement activities. The paper discusses the implications of both distortions. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

A new look into the determinants of the ecological discount rate: Disentangling social preferences

How should changes in environmental quality occurring in the future be discounted? To answer this question we consider a model of ecological discounting , where the representative consumer has a utility function defined over two attributes, consumption and environmental quality, which evolve stochastically over time. We characterize the determinants of the social discount rate and its behavior over time using a preference structure that disentangles attitudes towards intertemporal inequality, attitudes towards risk, and tastes over consumption and environmental quality. We show that the degree of substitutability between consumption and environmental quality, the degree of risk aversion, the degree of inequality aversion, and the rate at which these attitudes change as natural and man-made resources evolve over time are all important aspects of the ecological discount rate and its term structure. Our analysis suggests that over medium and long term horizons the ecological discount rate should be below the rate of time preference, supporting recent proposals for immediate action towards climate change mitigation