The empirical literature testing the economic theory of crime has extensively studied the relative importance of the … probability and the severity of punishment with reference to planned criminal activities. There are, however, also unplanned …

evidence on punishment preferences, in which subjects reveal a heterogeneous preference for punishing wrongdoers, our model … identifies circumstances in which “punitive” individuals (with stronger-than-average punishment preferences) will self …-select into law enforcement jobs that offer the opportunity to punish (or facilitate the punishment of) wrongdoers. Such “punitive …

abnormal returns found in the literature seem to be exaggerated by more than three times. Hence, the "punishment" effect …

Provided that the literature on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is overall inconclusive, the fact that …

can be tricky, this paper uses the crime strategic model (inspection game) proposed by Tsebelis. This model shows that any … attempts to increase the severity of punishment will alter the payoff of the individuals involved, leaving unchanged the … frequency of violation at equilibrium. This result is misleading: payoffs are not independent and the crime game can not be …

penalty to the severity of the crime. We combine individual-level data on sentence length for a representative sample of US … inmates with proxies for maximum punishment and monitoring costs across US states over 50 years. Consistent with the theory of …

, arrest increases the probability an offender is charged with a crime. Our findings argue against recent calls for a …