We find that lottery tax windfalls finance higher state-government expenditures on supplemental security income that increase consumption, but only during bust periods. Wealth transfers from lottery winners to low income households enable fiscal policy to stabilize consumption during bust periods.

In the presence of distortionary taxation, the destruction of wealth–either by an act of government or an act of God–can be welfare improving, because it increases the supply of labor and therefore (holding government spending constant) allows distortionary taxes to be lowered. We show that...

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 paper seeks to shed light on possible changes in the government debt dynamics for the first 12 euro area countries. Structural breaks are present around the global financial crisis for most countries, but not for Germany and France, the two core countries in the euro area. The properties of...

Using a unique data set that merges an electric utility’s residential customer monthly electricity consumption in 2008 with household level data on demographics, structure and neighborhood characteristics and the political party of registration for the head of household, this paper documents...

We introduce non-linear fiscal reaction functions with endogenously estimated state-varying thresholds to capture the behaviour of fiscal policy authorities during “good” and “bad” times. These thresholds vary with the level of debt, the economic cycle and a financial pressure index.