Liberal drug policy reform is often criticized for ‘sending the wrong message’, particularly to youth. Reform opponents argue that liberal policies such as decriminalisation and medical marijuana laws will cause marijuana to be perceived as less risky and lead to an increase in use....

In 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that each execution saves more than 70 lives. This example is used to show how easy it is, using simple or advanced econometric techniques, to produce results that do or do not support the deterrence hypothesis. Moreover, we also...

We explore theoretically and empirically whether social interaction, including local and global interaction, influences the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of corruption is positively associated with social...

We study the broken windows theory with a field experiment in a shared area of a workplace in academia (department common room). We explore academics' and postgraduate students' behaviour under an order condition (clean environment) and a disorder condition (messy environment). We find strong...

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less devastating and less attractive to terrorists through...

In recent years the topic of corruption has attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence about the determinants of corruption at the micro level. Therefore we explore in detail the impact of political interest using three different proxies....

Law backed by non-deterrent sanctions (mild law) has been hypothesized to achieve compliance because of norm activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild law in the provision of public goods by comparing it to severe law (deterrent sanctions) and no law. The results show that...

This paper studies the evolutions of tax morale in Spain in the post-Franco era. Tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, might be a key determinant of the actual degree of tax compliance in a country. But despite its potential significance, most studies in the previous...

This paper has a novel framework analysing what shapes superstition in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that socio-demographic and socio-economic variables matter. The results also indicate that there is a certain concurrence between churches and superstitious beliefs. In most of...

In recent years the topic of corruption has attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of corruption. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individuals using the World Values Survey wave III (1995-1997),...