Optimal Law Enforcement with a Rent-Seeking Government

Garoupa, Nuno; Klerman, Daniel M.

doi:10.1093/aler/4.1.116

Cited by 79 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…9 Polinsky (1980) and Garoupa and Klerman (2002) derive a similar result in a model in which prosecution is delegated to a private agency.…”

Section: Propositionmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…In contrast, the literature on delegated law enforcement (e.g., Polinsky, 1980, Friedman, 1984, Garoupa, 1997, Garoupa and Klerman, 2002 assumes the presence of a welfare maximizing principal who delegates law enforcement to a rent-seeking agent.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Polinsky (1980) and Garoupa and Klerman (2002) already established result (a) and, for high harms, result (b). In contrast to our model, these two papers include criminal utility in the government's utility function, which is the reason why they also find that rˆ might increase in α for small harms.…”

Section: The Government's Behaviormentioning

confidence: 92%

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The Optimal Use Of Fines And Imprisonment If Governments Don't Maximize Welfare

Dittmann

2001

SSRN Journal

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Abstract:We consider a stylized model of crime and punishment in which the prosecution policy is defined by three variables: the size of punishment, the type of punishment and the detection probability. We derive the optimal type of punishment under the assumption that the detection probability is chosen by a government whose objective function places a higher weight on the government's budget than the social welfare function does. We show that for serious crimes exclusive imprisonment is welfare maximizing. If costs of imprisonment are taken into account, the optimal punishment is a prison term with an additional fine that is smaller or equal to the costs of the prison term. For less serious crimes, fines without imprisonment are welfare maximizing.Therefore, this paper demonstrates that the standard result of the literature that fines should be used whenever feasible need not hold in the presence of a rent-seeking government. Moreover, it offers a new explanation for the wide-spread use of mandatory imprisonment for serious crimes.

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“…9 Polinsky (1980) and Garoupa and Klerman (2002) derive a similar result in a model in which prosecution is delegated to a private agency.…”

Section: Propositionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Optimal Use Of Fines And Imprisonment If Governments Don't Maximize Welfare

Dittmann

2001

SSRN Journal

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“…The framework we use for private enforcement is inspired by Polinsky (1980), Besanko and Spulber (1989) and Garoupa and Klerman (2002).…”

Section: Basic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We postpone to the end of this section the discussion of γ > f . In other words, we focus now on 2 See Polinsky (1980) and Garoupa and Klerman (2002) for private enforcement with hidden action.…”

Section: Basic Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%