From 2000 to 2010, more than 20 states passed laws that make it easier to use lethal force in self-defense. Elements of these laws include removing the duty to retreat in places outside of one's home, adding a presumption of reasonable belief of imminent harm, and removing civil liability for...

Adequate wages are an important tool to shield public officials from special interests and corruption. But what is the equilibrium effect of higher wages in the presence of criminal pressure groups, who use both bribes and violence? By means of a regression discontinuity design, we show that an...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the price of alcoholic beverages and the incidence of criminal violence in different countries around the world. The positive association between alcoholic beverage consumption and violence is well documented, as is the negative...

This paper examines student exposure to school shootings in the United States since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. We analyze shootings that occurred during school hours on a school day and resulted in a death. These shootings are likely to be uniformly reported and have a greater...

COVID-19 has led to an abrupt change in time spent at home, with many cities and states implementing official stay-at-home (SAH), or "lockdown" policies. Using cell phone block-level activity data and administrative 911 and crime data from the city of Chicago, we estimate the effects of the...

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We...

Child maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is a major social problem. This paper focuses on measuring the effects of child maltreatment on crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We focus on crime because it is one of...

Correctional facilities commonly lack climate control, producing a setting absent endogenous responses to hot weather like avoidance, adjustment, and mitigation. We study daily weather variation across the state of Mississippi, and show that high temperatures increase intense violence among the...

Conditional Cash transfer (CCT) programs have been shown to have positive effects on a variety of outcomes including education, consumption and health visits, amongst others. We estimate the long-run impacts of the urban version of Familias en Accion, the Colombian CCT program on crime, teenage...

Field experiments rely heavily on self-reported data, but subjects may misreport behaviors, especially sensitive ones such as crime. If treatment influences survey responses, it biases experimental estimates. We develop a validation technique that uses intensive qualitative work to assess survey...