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Posts Tagged ‘Bribes’

Making Prison Schoolwork Pay

Prisoners in Brazil now have a path to reduced sentences: schoolwork.  The Chicago Tribune reports that:

Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.

Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,” said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.

If Brazil is bribing its prisoners to do schoolwork, can bribing students be far behind?

(HT: Marginal Revolution)


Coase Goes to War

A “Smart Bribe” can be a lot cheaper than a “Smart Bomb.”


Shaq and the Case of the Missing Bribes

The extortion concern might explain a lot of our reluctance to offer bribes. But there are circumstances where a one-off bribe can work wonders. When my kids were little, I remember bribing a college student on an Amtrak train to move to another open seat so that my family could sit together.


Important Message to Economists: You No Longer Need to Be Nice to Me

I became an editor at the Journal of Political Economy eight years ago. The J.P.E., as it is known within the economics profession, is one of the most prestigious academic journals in economics. Having a paper accepted or rejected at J.P.E. can make or break a young academic’s career. My guess is that having a paper published in the journal . . .