During the period 2001-2009, four combat brigades and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment were based at Fort Carson, Colorado. These units were repeatedly deployed during the Iraq War, allowing us to measure the effect of arguably exogenous changes in troop levels on violent crime in El Paso...

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...

Despite intense public interest in keeping guns out of schools, next to nothing is known about the effects of gun control policies on youth gun carrying or school violence. Using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS) for the period 1993-2013, this study is the first to examine the...

Using the universe of individual asylum cases in the United States from 2000-2004 and a difference-in-differences research design, we test whether Sept. 11, 2001 decreased the likelihood that applicants from Muslim-majority countries were granted asylum. Our estimates suggest that the attacks...

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet, little is known about the impact of this inflow on labor markets, crime, and voting behavior. This article uses administrative data on refugee allocation and provides an...

In this paper we investigate the effects of delinquency and arrest on school leaving using information on males from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We use a multivariate mixed proportional hazard framework in order to account for common unobserved confounders and reverse...

We evaluate the impacts of adopting algorithmic predictions of future offending (risk assessments) as an aid to judicial discretion in felony sentencing. We find that judges' decisions are influenced by the risk score, leading to longer sentences for defendants with higher scores and shorter...

We examine the extent to which DNA exonerations can reveal whether wrongful conviction rates differ across races. We show that under a wide-range of assumptions regarding possible explicit or implicit racial biases in the DNA exoneration process (including no bias), our results suggest the...

Debate over safe-storage gun regulations has captured public attention in the aftermath of several high-profile shootings committed by minors. Whether these laws actually decrease youth gun violence, however, is an unanswered question. Using data from the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports for...

Little is known about the costs of crime to victims and their families. In this paper, we use unique and detailed register data on victimisations and labour market outcomes from the Netherlands to overcome data restrictions previously met in the literature and estimate event-study designs to...