We focus on a particular kind of discretionary behavior on the part of traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets – what we term speed discounting. It is anecdotally said that officers often give motorists a break by reporting a lower speed on their citation than the actual speed that they...

This study empirically investigates the potentially unintended effects of state laws that seek to improve safety in U.S. public school by mandating standardized student punishment. We estimate the effects of exogenous state-level variation in the quantity and type of such mandates on...

It is a widely accepted conclusion of the economic literature on optimal law enforcement that nonmonetary sanctions should be introduced only when fines have been used up to their maximum extent. In this paper it is shown that when the sanctioning policy conveys information about the harmfulness...

Agents may commit a crime twice. The act is inefficient so that the agents are to be deterred. Even if an agent is law abiding, she may still commit the act accidentally. The agents are wealth constrained. The government seeks to minimize the probability of apprehension. If the benefit from the...

This paper examines the optimal use of criminal solicitation as a law enforcement strategy. The benefits are greater deterrence of crime (due to the greater likelihood of apprehension), and the savings in social harm as some offenders are diverted away from committing actual crimes through...

In this paper we investigate when public enforcement of insider trading regulations reduces the amount of insider trading. We model a game between a potentially self-interested regulator enforcing insider trading laws and a trader who may be trading on inside information. We show that...

This paper studies optimal law enforcement in a model featuring preventive and non-preventive enforcement. Non-preventive enforcement is aimed at detecting and punishing offenders, while preventive enforcement seeks to prevent potential offenders from carrying out illegal actions (for example,...

This paper analyzes private precautions against crime when the value of the property to be protected is private information. In a framework in which potential criminals can choose between different crime opportunities, we establish that decentralized decision-making by potential victims may lead...

Private individuals and entities invest in a wide variety of market-provisioned self-protection devices or services to mitigate their probability of victimization to crime. However, evaluating the effect of such private security measures remains understudied in the economics of crime literature....

Changes in US Immigration laws between the mid-1980s to the late 1990s led to a sharp increase in criminal deportations. During the same years many poor countries, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, experienced a sharp increase in homicides. Using panel data for a sample of 38...