Optimal imprisonment and fines with non-discriminatory sentences

Nuno Garoupa and Murat Mungan

Economics Letters, 2019, vol. 182, issue C, 105-108

Abstract: When considering the optimal combination of monetary sanctions (costless) and imprisonment (costly) as deterrents, the traditional result is that imprisonment should not be imposed until monetary sanctions are completely exhausted. Therefore, imprisonment acts as a mere supplement to maximal fines. We show that, when wealth varies across individuals, it could be efficient to use imprisonment in combination with fines that do not exhaust the wealth of all individuals. The rationale is that, generally, it is impractical to tailor criminal sanctions as a continuous function of individuals’ wealth.

Keywords: Imprisonment; Fines; Deterrence; Law enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K0 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176519302344
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:182:y:2019:i:c:p:105-108

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2019.06.016

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().