This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique dataset of all felony trials in Sarasota County, Florida between 2004 and 2009. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random...

Using historical data on early settlers to the United States, this paper tests and confirms the “Culture of Honor” hypothesis by socio-psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett (1994, 1996). This hypothesis argues that the high prevalence of homicides in the US South stems from the fact...

There are few reliable estimates of the effects of violence on economic outcomes. This study exploits the manifold increase in homicides in 2008-2011 in Mexico resulting from its war on organized drug traffickers to estimate the effect of drug- related homicides on housing prices. Using an...

Many recent studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption at the cross-national level. This study complements these existing cross-country studies by focusing on firm-level evidence of microeconomic factors affecting bribes paid in a single...

We show that laws and institutions that grant creditors stronger enforcement rights and bargaining power upon default increase expected recovery rates on collateral. Using unique data that provides ex-ante appraised liquidation values on secured loans for a single global bank, we estimate...

What is the long-term effect of organised crime presence on social capital accumulation? By leveraging novel social capital and organised crime data, this study investigates this question within the Italian landscape. In an instrumental variable (IV) setting, we exploit the forced resettlement...

This paper investigates the impact of heterogeneous beliefs of professional investors on the currency options market. Using a unique data set with detailed information on the foreign-exchange forecasts of about 50 market participants over more than ten years, we construct an empirical proxy for...

The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct quarterly historical measures of inequality from 1969 to 2012. We investigate whether monetary policy shocks played a role in explaining...

This paper examines the effects of monetary policy shocks on UK regional economic growth and dispersion in a novel Constrained Mixed Frequency Vector Autoregressive framework. Compared to a standard MFVAR, the model partially accounts for missing quarterly observations for regional growth by...

The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct historical measures of inequality from 1968 to 2008. We study whether monetary policy shocks played a significant role in explaining this...