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.

This paper explores historical patterns of racial segregation and its relationship with the observed spatial variation in contemporaneous economic mobility established in Chetty et al. (2014). We combined data from the Equality of Opportunity Project with a novel measure of racial segregation...

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.

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...

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.

This paper introduces a new approach for measuring vulnerability to poverty, using the standard downside mean-semideviation as a risk parameter. We identify vulnerability by comparing the uncertain outcomes of household well-being with poverty line in a mean-risk behavior framework.