Book Description

How to induce corporate compliance with regulations? Harsh punishments will cause companies to disguise violations, and mild punishments will cause companies to report their violations and make weak efforts to avoid them. In this book, Sharon Oded canvasses the history of thinking about corporate compliance, and he proposes his own candidate for the best law. This is a sophisticated account of legal incentives that will repay any reader interested in corporate compliance. Robert Cooter, University of California, Berkeley, US The effective control of corporate misconduct is a vital but elusive task for regulators, given the complexity of organization structures and the need to find the right balance between deterrent- and cooperative-based enforcement policies. In this powerful and comprehensive study, Sharon Oded argues for combining different approaches and boldly advocates, in particular, the use of third-party independent corporate monitoring firms to implement self-policing strategies. This will be essential reading for those involved in the theory or practice of regulatory corporate enforcement. Anthony Ogus, University of Manchester, UK and University of Rotterdam, The Netherlands This book considers how a regulatory enforcement policy should be designed to efficiently induce proactive corporate compliance. It first explores two major schools of thought regarding law enforcement, both the deterrence and cooperative approaches, and shows that neither of these represents an optimal regulatory enforcement paradigm from a social welfare perspective. It provides a critical analysis of recent developments in US Federal corporate liability regimes, and proposes a generic framework that better tailors sanction schemes and monitoring systems to regulatee performance. The proposed framework efficiently induces corporate proactive compliance, while maintaining an optimal level of deterrence. This insightful book will appeal to academics in law and economics, behavioral economics, criminology, and business, as well as to practitioners and policymakers.