Even risk-neutral individuals can insure themselves against crimes by combining direct expenditure on security with costly diversification. In such cases — and even when one of these options is infeasible — greater policing often actually encourages private precautions.

Empirical studies have found that increasing the probability of punishment has a greater effect on crime than the severity of punishment. This note explains this as the result of criminals having imperfect information on their criminal ability. As they commit crimes, they update their estimates...

We consider how parties’ formal contracts are underpinned by their ongoing relationship and how welfare changes as the legal system improves. Regardless of impatience, the parties write formal contracts that they would not honor–despite stipulated penalties–if they interacted only once....

Working with a unique neighborhood homicide dataset from 2008 to 2010, this paper makes two contributions. First, we capture the importance of the spatial dependence on homicide rates within large urban center neighborhoods. Second, we measure the influence of spatial dependence more precisely...

We analyse bonus payments for officials, who transfer payments truthfully to the government rather than collecting bribes. We show that optimised bonus payments are always beneficial to the government, making them a more effective anti-corruption measure than simple wage increases.

This note examines a common explanation why participants of panel surveys may report declining life satisfaction over time. In line with the argument of developing trust relationships between interviewers and interviewees, the analysis reveals positive effects in reported life satisfaction when...

At the time of disability onset, the effect of disability insurance on earnings is limited by the finding that work-prevented respondents, who account for the majority of benefit claims, have negligible earnings regardless of application status.

We present a model of preferences on welfare transfers, which incorporates the recipient’s wealth as a signal of needs and deservingness. We show that a paradox may arise: the poorer the recipient is, the less transfer he/she will get. Implications might include the negative impact of...

We propose an empirical likelihood-based method of inference for comparing inequality between two populations. A series of Monte Carlo experiments are used to assess our method’s finite sample performance. We illustrate our approach using some Canadian household income data.

We evaluate the role of functional form of demographics in demand analysis by proposing the GQL ‘unstructured’ demographically transformed model which nests the Barten–Gorman demographically modified model and popular rank-3 and rank-2 demand systems. We use UK individual data and find...