Auditing institutions, such as the German Federal Court of Audit (BRH), provide information on public revenue and public spending. The question of how to increase tax compliance has been of frequent interest. Unfortunately, information from German taxpayers? declaration behaviour (beyond the...

El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala count among today's most violent countries of the world. Qualitative research has claimed that large-scale deportations of Central American convicts have played an important role for the spread of gangs and rampant violence in the region. Using a novel...

Internationally, there is no consensus concerning the legal and moral judgment of prostitution. Nevertheless, there is an overwhelming agreement on the need to fight sexual slavery. We analyze how a law - introduced to punish clients of commercial sex services - affects market outcomes. More...

We study a theoretical general equilibrium environment in which the only activity of interest is armed robbery. Agents choose whether to be citizens or robbers, and whether to purchase handguns. Armed citizens can protect themselves from robbery but any armed agent runs the risk of accidentally...

In this article we develop a theoretical model to explain the homicide rate in any given place and construct a Bayesian model with a spatial structure to test the hypotheses. We assume that in his quest for self-fulfilment the individual, when taking the decision to perpetrate violence, not only...

As illicit substances move into the legal product space, substitution patterns with legal products become more salient. In particular, marijuana legalization may have implications for the use of other legal "sin" goods. We estimate a structural model of multi-product use of illegal and legal...

On July 13, 2020 a complete nation-wide ban was placed on the sale and transport of alcohol in South Africa. This paper evaluates the impact of this sudden and unexpected five-week alcohol prohibition on mortality due to unnatural causes. We find that the policy reduced the number of unnatural...

This paper investigates the relation between social capital and crime. The analysis contributes to explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across space. By employing current and historical data for Dutch municipalities and by providing novel indicators to measure social capital, we find a link...

We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. The waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities, investing costly effort in concealment, respectively detect ion, of tax evasion. We show that (socially ineffcient) efforts depend positively on the...

Using the Cox proportional hazards model this paper empirically investigates how migration of household members and the receipt of remittances affect educational outcomes in Haiti. Based on a theoretical approach it tries to disentangle the effects of both phenomena that have mostly been jointly...