This paper deals with the effect of gun laws on crime. Several empirical analyses are carried to investigate the relationship between five different crime rates and alternative law variables. The tests are based on cross-section data from US sates. Three different law variables are used in the...

This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on...

Taxpayers often view tax rules and filing processes as complicated. In this paper I study whether the perceived tax uncertainty among peers leads to a reduction of voluntary tax compliance. I find strong supportive evidence for this hypothesis using a survey experiment for a large representative...

Recent evidence suggests a positive impact of air pollution on crime in large cities. We provide first evidence on the potential effect of air pollution on criminal activity using a broader set of geographical regions with lower air pollution levels. We use a unique combination of daily crime...

We analyze the impact of the Network Enforcement Act, the first regulation which aims at restraining hate speech on large social media platforms. Using a difference-in- differences framework, we measure the causal impact of the German law on the prevalence of hateful content on German Twitter....

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...

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...

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...

In this article, we examine anti-foreigner hate crime in the wake of the large influx of asylum seekers to Germany in 2014 and 2015. By exploiting the quasi-experimental assignment of asylum seekers to German regions, we estimate the causal effect of an unexpected and sudden change in the share...

We estimate the effect of the level of fines on payment compliance and revenues collected from speeding tickets. Exploiting discontinuous increases in fines at speed cutoffs and reform induced variation in these discontinuities, we implement two complementary regression discontinuity designs....