A Theory of “Too Big To Jail”

Iwan Bos

No 7, Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE)

Abstract: Motivated by some recent examples, this paper employs a model of public law enforcement to explain why it may not be in society’s interest to send criminals to prison. We establish two main findings. First, independent of the lawbreaker’s societal position, imprisonment is suboptimal when the harm from the illegal activity is sufficiently small. Second, for a given level of harm, imprisonment is suboptimal when the lawbreaker is sufficiently important. This latter result thus provides a rationale for why some parties are taken to be “too big to jail”.

JEL-codes: D63 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/ws/files/64272298/RM21007.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Theory of ‘Too Big To Jail’ (2021)
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:unm:umagsb:2021007

DOI: 10.26481/umagsb.2021007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Willems () and Leonne Portz ().