The economic literature on optimal law enforcement is very recent. Becker's seminal paper on crime and law enforcement dates from 1968 and most papers which are the focus of this survey have been published in the last ten years.The core result presented by Becker is the following: the probability and the severity of punishment deter crime. Therefore, the fine should be maximal since it is a costless transfer whereas the probability of detection and conviction is costly. Much of the recent work has attempted to show why Becker's result may not hold.

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This paper makes several contributions to the growing literature on the economics of religion. First, we explicitly introduce spatiallocation models into the economics of religion. Second, we offer a new explanation for the observed tendency of state (monopoly) churches to locate toward the "low-tension" end of the "strictness continuum" (in a one-dimensional product space): This result is obtained through the conjunction of "benevolent preferences" (denominations care about the aggregate utility of members) and asymmetric costs of going to a more or less strict church than one prefers.We also derive implications regarding the relationship between religious strictness and membership. The driving forces of our analysis, religious market interactions and asymmetric costs of membership, highlight new explanations for some well-established stylized facts. The analysis opens the way to new empirical tests, aimed at confronting the implications of our model against more traditional explanations.

The paper develops a model of crime reporting based on an economic approach. It identifies the principal costs and benefits of reporting from the victim's perspective, taking account of insurance provision and the risk of intimidation by an offender. It shows how a victim might use backward induction to infer a rational reporting strategy. The recording of crime by the police is a process that relies on victim reports, and is thus influenced by the reporting decisions made by victims. The paper uses empirical evidence from the British Crime Survey and from the International Crime Victims Survey to explore the hypotheses generated by the model. It finds support for the suggestion that the propensity to report a crime increases with the size of the loss entailed. The paper also explores the implications of the findings for the estimation of the costs of crime. Reporting and intimidation costs are generally excluded from bottom-up estimates of costs, an omission that may be quite serious in the context of offences such as domestic violence.

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The economic literature on crime and punishment focuses on the trade-off between probability and severity of punishment, and suggests that detection probability and fines are substitutes. In this paper it is shown that, in presence of substantial underdeterrence caused by costly detection and punishment, these instruments may become complements. When offenders are poor, the deterrent value of monetary sanctions is low. Thus, the government does not invest a lot in detection. If offenders are rich, however, the deterrent value of monetary sanctions is high, so it is more profitable to prosecute them. JEL: K4