Related papers: Expropriations, Property Confiscations and New Off…
It is estimated that Italian Mafias registered 135 billion euros in profits only in 2010. Part of this huge amount of money, coming mostly from the drugs, prostitution and arms illicit markets, is often used to invest into legitimate…
Economists, historians, and social scientists have long debated how open-access areas, frontier regions, and customary landholding regimes came to be enclosed or otherwise transformed into private property. This paper analyzes decentralized…
Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but…
Tax compliance among small businesses remains low in developing countries, yet little is known about how regional context shapes the effectiveness of enforcement strategies. Both theory and evidence suggest an ambiguous relationship between…
This paper develops a political-economy theory of statehood without capacity. I argue that under specific institutional and geopolitical conditions, a polity can become trapped in an equilibrium of nominal statehood: a state in which claims…
Building on topological data analysis and expert knowledge, this study introduces a Mapper-based approach to cluster agents based on their tendency to be influenced by information spread. The context of our paper is financial markets with…
Tax evasion, usually the largest component of an informal economy, is a persistent challenge over history with significant socio-economic implications. Many socio-economic studies investigate its dynamics, including influencing factors, the…
This note proposes the segregation of independent endogenous and exogenous components of tax penalty probability to introduce a formal demonstration that enforcement and tax penalties are negatively related with income shifting. JEL F23;…
Many empirical studies have shown that government quality is a key determinant of vulnerability to natural disasters. Protection against natural disasters can be a public good -- flood protection, for example -- or a natural monopoly --…
We report quantitative relations between corruption level and economic factors, such as country wealth and foreign investment per capita, which are characterized by a power law spanning multiple scales of wealth and investments per capita.…
We examine how uncertain veracity of external news influences investor beliefs, market prices and corporate disclosures. Despite assuming independence between the news' veracity and the firm's endowment with private information, we find…
We incorporate the behaviour of tax evasion into the standard two-dimensional Ising model and augment it by providing policy-makers with the opportunity to curb tax evasion via an appropriate enforcement mechanism. We discuss different…
Preventing data exfiltration from computer systems typically depends on perimeter defences, but these are becoming increasingly fragile. Instead we suggest an approach in which each at-risk document is supplemented by many fake versions of…
The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such…
This paper examines the effect of ownership concentration on product position, product variety and readership in markets for daily newspapers. US antitrust policy presumes that mergers reduce the amount and diversity of content available to…
Autocrats use secret police to stay in power, as these organizations deter and suppress opposition to their rule. Existing research shows that secret police succeed at this but, surprisingly, also that they are not as ubiquitous in…
Attempts to curb illegal activity by enforcing regulations gets complicated when agents react to the new regulatory regime in unanticipated ways to circumvent enforcement. We present a research strategy that uncovers such reactions, and…
It has been shown that one can accommodate data (Bayes) and constraints (MaxEnt) in one method, the method of Maximum (relative) Entropy (ME) (Giffin 2007). In this paper we show a complex agent based example of inference with two different…
One frequently given explanation for why autocrats maintain corrupt and inefficient institutions is that the autocrats benefit personally even though the citizens of their countries are worse off. The empirical evidence does not support…
The international financial system is currently not yet prepared to face a foreseeable crisis mainly motivated by the dichotomy between the real economy and the virtual economy. Skepticism is widespread even when it comes to investments in…