Greek-letter student social groups, better known as fraternities and sororities, are a ubiquitous feature on many American higher education campuses. These organizations, especially fraternities, have a reputation for encouraging unruly and improper behavior among both members and non-members....

Recent years have seen a rise in mass shooting incidents in the United States. While direct victims and their families undoubtedly suffer the most serious consequence of mass shootings, little is known on whether mass shootings have negative impacts beyond those immediately exposed to the...

The UK Welfare Reform Act 2012 imposed a series of welfare cuts, which disproportionately impacted ex-ante poorer areas. In this paper, we consider the impact of these austerity measures on two different but complementary elements of crime - the crime rate and the less-studied concentration of...

Employing nonparametric bounds, we examine the effect of military service on incarceration outcomes using the Vietnam draft lotteries as a possibly invalid instrumental variable for military service. The draft is allowed to have a direct effect on the outcomes independently of military service,...

In this paper, I assess the causal effects of judicial administration on a sample of Italian criminal firms in the period 2004-2016, to shed light on the dynamic path of the firm's performance from pre-seizure to the post-entry judicial administration phase. By using exogenous enforcement law...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). Using a unique web scraped dataset containing detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders, I first show that the Russian mafia originated in the Soviet Gulag archipelago, and could be found near the...

This paper studies the effect of changes in economic conditions on crime. We exploit the 1990s trade liberalization in Brazil as a natural experiment generating exogenous shocks to local economies. We document that regions exposed to larger tariff reductions experienced a temporary increase in...

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...

We examine the relationship between extreme temperatures and violent mortality across Russian regions, with implications for the social costs of climate change. We assess the unequal impact of temperature shocks across gender and age groups by exploring a dataset on temperature and violence in...

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...