We report results from economic experiments of decisions that are best described as petty larceny, with high school and college students who can anonymously steal real money from each other. Our design allows exogenous variation in the rewards of crime, and the penalty and probability of...

This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a...

Although there exists a large literature analyzing whether an individual's peers have an impact on that individual's own behavior and subsequent outcomes, there is paucity of research on whether peers influence a person's decisions and judgments regarding a third party. We investigate whether...

This paper presents the first analysis in the literature of the effect of test-based grade retention on adult criminal convictions. We exploit math and English test cutoffs for promotion to ninth grade in Louisiana using administrative data on all public K-12 students combined with...

Using a nationally-representative panel data set of U.S. high school students (AddHealth data) that contains a relatively large sample of siblings and twins, the paper investigates the impacts of gun availability at home and individual drug use on robbery, burglary, theft and damaging property...

Although there is a sizeable literature on the effect of private school attendance on academic student outcomes, the number of studies that investigate the impact of school sector on non-academic outcomes is limited. Using a rich data set, we analyze the impact of Catholic school attendance on...

This is the first paper to test the economic model of crime for juveniles using micro data. It uses a nationally representative sample of 16,478 high school children surveyed in 1995. The sample includes not only detailed information on offenses, but also data on personal, family and...

This paper uses a data set that consists of the entire history of 6,143 death sentences between 1977 and 1997 in the United States to investigate the impact of capital punishment on homicide. This data set is merged with state panels that include crime and deterrence measures as well as state...

This paper contributes to the debate on the impact of juvenile punishment on adult criminal recidivism and high school completion. We link the universe of case files of those who were convicted of a crime as a juvenile between 1996 and 2012 in a southern U.S. state to the public school...

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We investigate the behavior of judges, the conduct of whom...