EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Money Laundering and its Regulation

Alberto Chong and Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes ()

No 1599, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: The recent wave of terrorist attacks has increased the attention paid to money laundering activities. Using several methodologies, this paper investigates empirically the determinants of money laundering and its regulation in over 80 countries by assembling a cross-country dataset on proxies for money laundering and the prevalence of feeding activities. The paper additionally constructs specific money laundering regulation indices based on available information on laws and their mechanisms of enforcement and measures their impact on money laundering proxies. The paper finds that tougher money laundering regulations, particularly those that criminalize feeding activities and improve disclosure, are linked to lower levels of money laundering across countries; the results are robust to potential endogeneity of money laundering regulation. The relevance of historical factors in explaining the variation of money laundering regulation across countries sheds light on theories of institutions and provides room for further action, particularly in the areas of the law that improve the impact of criminalization, including liability of intermediaries, reductions of the burden of proof and better disclosure.

Keywords: WP-590 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... d-its-Regulation.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Money Laundering and Its Regulation (2015) Downloads
Working Paper: Money Laundering and its Regulation (2007) Downloads
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:idb:brikps:1599

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:idb:brikps:1599