IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sef/csefwp/232.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Accomplice-Witnesses, Organized Crime and Corruption: Theory and Evidence from Italy

Author

Abstract

Since 1991 the Italian Legislator grants amnesties, protection and even economic bene.ts to former mobsters cooperating with the justice. These incentives were intro- duced to break down omertà. What is the economic logic behind this policy? Did the program succeed? To address these issues we develop a model accounting for the main trade-o¤s involved in the introduction of accomplice-witnesses regulations. We argue that rewarding informants is sometimes necessary to .ght organized crime and show how the optimal amnesty varies with the e¤ectiveness of the protection program, the reliability of the informants.testimonies, the strength of external complicities, and the internal cohesion between criminal partners. The optimal policy sti.es crime, spurs prosecution and induce a negative relationship between the number of talkers and the conviction rate. The available evidence supports the model.s predictions.

Suggested Citation

  • Antonio Acconcia & Giovanni Immordino & Salvatore Piccolo & Patrick Rey, 2009. "Accomplice-Witnesses, Organized Crime and Corruption: Theory and Evidence from Italy," CSEF Working Papers 232, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy, revised 17 Oct 2009.
    • Handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:232
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.csef.it/WP/wp232.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Spagnolo, Giancarlo & Dufwenberg, Martin, 2011. "Legalizing Bribes," SITE Working Paper Series 13, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, revised 12 May 2013.
    2. Paolo Pinotti, 2012. "The Economic Costs of Organized Crime: Evidence from Southern Italy," Working Papers 054, "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Accomplice-witnesses; Criminal Organizations; Leniency; Whistle-Blower;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:232. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dr. Maria Carannante (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cssalit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.