Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty...

Bride kidnapping is a form of forced marriage in which a woman is taken against her will and coerced into accepting marriage with her captor. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan has seen a large increase in the prominence of this practice alongside a revitalization of traditional values and culture. As part...

This paper examines the US gun-related murder (GM) rate and places it in an international perspective. The data show that the US GM rate is 27 times the average rate for 22 other developed countries (ODC). Its gun ownership rate is 5.4 times that of ODC and the murder rate per gun is 5 times...

This paper studies the role of population sex ratio, i.e. ratio of men to women, in the global wave of sodomy law reform in the post-WWII era. Using a global survey, this paper first finds that men are more homophobic than women and such pattern has persisted across countries and time. With a...

Gender inequality and discrimination still persist, even though the gender gap in the labor market has been gradually decreasing. This study examines the effect of the #MeToo movement on judges' gender gap in their vital labor market outcome-judicial decisions on randomly assigned legal cases in...

We study the effect of mass shooting exposure on individuals' mental health by using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our identification strategy relies on the quasi-randomness of mass shootings in a staggered difference-in-differences design. We compare changes in mental health outcomes of...

In this paper we take a fresh look at the magnitude of the trade-off between caring informally for a parent and paid work. We adopt a simultaneous approach with a primary focus on how hours of care are influenced by hours of work rather than the other way round. We also investigate the role that...

This study empirically investigates how economic integration influences individuals’ national identity. Due to historical reasons and unique cross-strait politics, some people in Taiwan identify themselves as Chinese while others identify themselves as Taiwanese. Using individual survey data...

We empirically assess the effect of historical slavery on the African American family structure. Our hypothesis is that female single headship among blacks is more likely to emerge in association not with slavery per se, but with slavery in sugar plantations, since the extreme demographic and...

This research establishes empirically that existing cross-language variations in the structure of the future tense and the presence of grammatical gender affected human capital accumulation. Exploiting variations in the dominant languages among migrants from the same countries of origin, the...