Congratulations to our 2023 JEI Editors Prize winner, Clotilde Champeyrache! Her winning paper, from the December 2022 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues, is titled “Institutional Mistrust, Instrumental Trust, and the Privatization of Law: The Mafia as a Territorial Ruler,” and can be read here.
Clotilde Champeyrache specializes in the economics of crime. She is a lecturer at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Security-Defense-Intelligence Division, ESDR3C team.
Her research focuses on organized crime, particularly mafia crime, and on the criminal infiltration of the legal economy. She has published numerous articles in economics and geopolitics on these topics as well as books, such as Quand la mafia se légalise: Pour une approche économique institutionnaliste (CNRS Editions, 2016), La face cachée de l'économie: Néolibéralisme et criminalités (PUF, 2019) and Géopolitique des mafias (Le Cavalier bleu, 2022). She is currently working with the publisher Routledge on a book project entitled: Economics of Organized Crime: An Original Institutional Approach.
On her work, Champeyrache says: “Not satisfied with the traditional Gary Becker-style crime economics and passionate about mafias, I seek to understand the economic reality of criminal phenomena. I started my work from the field (notably police investigations and anti-mafia trial sentences). It quickly became clear to me that the connections between the economic and the legal, as well as the issue of power, were central to an in-depth understanding of organized crime, particularly mafia crime. Hence my proposal to renew crime economics by bringing in the specificities of the original institutional approach inspired by Commons. This article is thus part of a global project to build an original institutional approach to crime and I am deeply touched to receive this award which encourages me to continue on this path.”