Legal Standards, Enforcement and Corruption

Giovanni Immordino and Marco Pagano

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: Stricter laws require more incisive and costlier enforcement. Since enforcement activity depends both on available tax revenue and the honesty of officials, the optimal legal standard of a benevolent government is increasing in per-capita income and decreasing in officials’ corruption. In contrast to the “tollbooth view” of regulation, the standard chosen by a self-interested government is a non-monotonic function of officials’ corruption, and can be either lower or higher than that chosen by a benevolent regulator. International evidence on environmental regulation show that standards correlate positively with percapita income, and negatively with corruption, consistently with the model’s predictions for benevolent governments.

Keywords: legal standards; enforcement; corruption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 K42 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-06-01, Revised 2009-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, Vol. 8, No. 5, September 2010.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp98.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Legal Standards, Enforcement, and Corruption (2010)
Working Paper: Legal Standards, Enforcement and Corruption (2009)
Working Paper: Legal Standards, Enforcement and Corruption (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sef:csefwp:98

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