The threat of overthrow stabilizes a constitution because it disciplines the elites. This is the main rationale behind rights to resistance. In this paper, we test this conjecture experimentally. We model a society in which players can produce wealth by solving a coordination problem....

This paper analyzes private precautions against crime when the value of the property to be protected is private information. In a framework in which potential criminals can choose between different crime opportunities, we establish that decentralized decision-making by potential victims may lead...

This paper analyzes a contest in which defenders move first, have private information about the value of the objects they are trying to protect, and determine the observability of their defense efforts. The equilibrium consistent with the intuitive criterion depends on the distribution of...

We investigate how third-party punishers and potential violators decide under evidentiary uncertainty in a take game. In line with the legal requirement and in contrast to economic models, neither the sanction nor the harm level affects the punishment probability, but the quality of evidence...

This paper offers a new argument for why a more aggressive enforcement of minor offenses ('zero-tolerance') may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both minor offenses and more severe crime. We develop a model of criminal subcultures in which people gain social status among their peers...

A number of studies have shown that education reforms extending compulsory schooling reduce criminal behavior of those affected by the reform. We consider the effects of a major Swedish educational reform on crime by exploiting its staggered implementation across Sweden. We first show that the...

Offenders are more likely than non-offenders to be victims, and victims are more likely than non-victims to be offenders. The overlap between offenders and victims is not well understood in criminology, and in the economics of crime the stylized empirical fact is even widely ignored. The paper...

Delinquents are embedded in a network of relationships. Social ties among delinquents are modeled by means of a graph where delinquents compete for a booty and benefit from local interactions with their neighbors. Each delinquent decides in a non-cooperative way how much delinquency effort he...

We study criminal incentives exploiting the devastating shock of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Evidence shows that the earthquake decreased burglaries but left other crime types unaffected. The effect stays significant even after controlling for unemployment, policing and income. We corroborate this...

In economic models of crime individuals respond to changes in the potential value of criminal opportunities. We analyse this issue by estimating crime-price elasticities from detailed data on criminal incidents in London between 2002 and 2012. The unique data feature we exploit is a detailed...