The trade-off between the immediate returns from committing a crime and the future costs of punishment depends on an offender's time discounting. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sentence length generated by a large collective pardon in Italy and provide non-parametric evidence on the...

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 use rich microdata on bank robberies to estimate individual-level disutilities of imprisonment. The identification rests on the money versus apprehension trade-off that robbers face inside the bank when deciding whether to leave or collect money for an additional minute. The distribution of...

Social network analysis can help us understand more about the root causes of delinquent behavior and crime and provide practical guidance for the design of crime prevention policies. To illustrate these points, we first present a selective review of several key studies and findings from the...

Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority...

Do reductions in arrests increase crime? We study line-of-duty deaths of police officers, events that likely impact police behavior through increased fear but are unlikely to directly impact civilian behavior. Officer deaths cause significant short-term reductions in all arrest types, with the...

This paper analyzes the impact of immigrant deportations on local crime and police efficiency. Our identification relies on increases in the deportation rate driven by the introduction of the Secure Communities (SC) program, an immigration enforcement program based on local-federal cooperation...

We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price movements on the...