Dua and Miller (1996) created leading and coincident employment indexes for the state of Connecticut, following Moore's (1981) work at the national level. The performance of the Dua-Miller indexes following the recession of the early 1990s fell short of expectations. This paper performs two...

The concept of collective responsibility, or group punishment, for crimes or other harmful acts was a pervasive feature of ancient societies, as exemplified by the Roman doctrines of quasi-delicts and noxal liability, and the Greek notion of “pollution.” This chapter briefly surveys...

This paper explores the advantages of focusing law enforcement on some locations when offenders can choose locations. The substitutability of different crimes from the offender's perspective is established as the key variable determining whether asymmetric enforcement is socially desirable. When...

Marginal deterrence concerns the incentives created by criminal penalties for oenders to refrain from committing more harmful acts. We show that when offenders act sequentially, it is often optimal for the level of the sanction, not just the expected sanction, to rise with the severity of the...

This paper incorporates the reality that the bulk of law enforcement is decentralized while sanctions are chosen centrally, and explores the implications for the socially optimal sanction level. The presence of interregional externalities in the form of crime diversion induces socially excessive...

The standard economic model of crime since Becker (1968) is primarily concerned with deterrence. Actual punishment policies, however, appear to rely on imprisonment to a greater extent than is prescribed by that model. One reason may be the incapacitation function of prison. The model developed...

The standard economic model of crime focuses on the goal of deterrence, but actual punishment schemes, most notably recent three-strikes laws, seem to rely more on imprisonment than is prescribed by that model. One explanation is that prison also serves an incapacitation function. The current...

The issue of bias-motivated crimes has attracted consderable attention in recent years. In this paper, we develop an economic framework to analyze penalty enhancements for bias-motivated crimes. We extend the standard model by introducing two different groups of potential victims of crime, and...

Standard models of law enforcement involve the apprehension and punishment of a single suspect, but in many contexts, punishment is actually imposed on an entire group known to contain the offender. The advantages of .group punishment. are that the offender is punished with certainty and...

This paper studies the institutional structure of criminal sentencing, focusing on the interaction between legislatures, which set sentencing ranges ex ante, and judges, who choose actual sentences from within those ranges ex post. The key question concerns the optimal degree of judicial...