This paper offers a new argument for why a more aggressive enforcement of minor offenses ('zero-tolerance') may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both minor offenses and more severe crime. We develop a model of criminal subcultures in which people gain social status among their peers...

The overall goal of the report is to increase the capacity of researchers and policy makers to identify comparatively, and across time, how individuals, households and communities are affected by violent conflict. The report provides an extensive overview of existing practices and datasets used...

Agents operating in illegal markets cannot resort to the justice system to guarantee property rights, to enforce contracts, or to seek protection from competitors' improper behaviors. In these contexts, violence is used to enforce previous agreements and to fight for market share. This...

Although social institutions permeate the world in which we live, they are all but absent from our analyses of economic growth and development. This paper argues the need to mitigate this omission by demonstrating the importance of social institutions for growth and development

Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive evidence that economic downturns increase abuse, despite their impacts on family income. In this paper, we address this seeming contradiction....

To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona and New...

Dominant development policy approaches recommend women's employment on the grounds that it facilitates their empowerment, which in turn is believed to be instrumental in enhancing women's well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women's employment status and their...

This study builds on the findings of Carrell and Hoekstra (2010, 2018) by exploring the peer effects of domestic violence exposure over the academic attainment of secondary school students in Peru. However, we also study these peer effects over a novel set of outcomes: internalizing behaviors...

Domestic violence remains a serious public problem, especially in Hispanic communities, where one in three women are victims of domestic violence in their lifetimes. Yet, less than 50 percent of Hispanic women report the incidents, indicating lack of confidence in the police and fear they might...

This paper estimates the causal effect of a targeted panic button program – implemented in two Turkish provinces between 2012 and 2016 – on domestic violence against women. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control estimates suggest that the program notably increased physical domestic...