This paper empirically estimates a murder supply equation for the United States from 1965 to 2001 within a cointegration and error correction framework. Our findings suggest that any support for the deterrence hypothesis is sensitive to the inclusion of variables for the effect of guns and other...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

We offer a simple general equilibrium model to analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e. shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) will affect the intensity of social conflict over the distribution of resources. Examples of conflict activities range from crime to civil war. We show that...

Decision theorists claim that an ordinal measure of risk may be sufficient for an agent to make a rational choice under uncertainty. We propose a measure of financial risk, namely the Varying Cross-sectional Risk (VCR), that is based on a ranking of returns. VCR is defined as the probability of...

In this paper we propose a new test statistic that considers multiple structural breaks to analyse the non-stationarity of a panel data set. The methodology is based on the common factor analysis in an attempt to allow for some sort of dependence across the individuals. Thus allowing for...

Bootstrap aggregating or Bagging, introduced by Breiman (1996a), has been proved to be effective to improve on unstable forecast. Theoretical and empirical works using classification, regression trees, variable selection in linear and non-linear regression have shown that bagging can generate...

This paper uses DOGEV model for modelling determinates of poverty in Eritrea by employing Eritrean Household Income and Expenditure Survey 1996/97 data. Education impacts welfare differently across poverty categories and there are pockets of poverty in the educated population sub group. Effect...

Tests and estimation for changes in the coefficients of linear regression models, particularly the analysis of covariance and the Chow tests, are well known to econometricians and are widely used. This paper demonstrates that analogous estimation can also be constructed in simultaneous equation...

The adverse effects of excessive alcohol consumption are well-known. Of great concern to policy makers is to understand the potentially different drivers for consumers of different levels of alcohol consumption. Using unit record data from the Australian Drug Strategy Household Surveys, this...

Using 20-year panel data, this paper tests Japanese companies' sequential decisions: (1) to invest abroad or not and (2) if so, what ownership strategy for that local company to be employed. In addition to transaction advantage emphasized by traditional studies on FDI, the focus is the role of...