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.

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.

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.

Using short-run expenditures from household surveys as a proxy may create attenuated estimates of the impact of permanent income on economic outcomes. We use repeated observations to calculate reliability ratios and estimate errors in variables regressions of the impact of income on nutrition....

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...

Iron deficiency anemia is the most prevalent nutritional deficiency in the world, affecting more than 2 billion people in developing countries. We show that a modest cash transfer substantially reduced anemia among women of reproductive age in rural Ecuador.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the intensity of the recent global economic crisis and the current economic position of EU countries on the one hand and relative poverty and/or inequality on the other. Using data from the 27 EU member states we find a link between economic...