Entrepreneurship is usually identified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This paper...

Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses. So far there has been little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area. In this paper we report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor...

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...

Climate change has stimulated growing interest in the influence of temperature on cognition, mood and decision making. This paper is the first investigation of the impact of temperature on the outcomes of criminal court cases. It is motivated by Heyes and Saberian (2019, AEJ: Applied Economics),...

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...

We study the role of formal institutions of contract enforcement in facilitating investments in small and medium firms(MSME). In a framework where established entrepreneurs can enforce contracts informally using their network ties and hierarchical advantage, we argue that an efficient formal...