Law enforcement officers are allowed to exercise a significant amount of street-level discretion in a variety of ways. In this paper, we focus on a particular prominent kind of discretionary behavior by traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets, speed discounting. Officers partially forgive...

This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights and empirical findings concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of...

Recently, police departments, legislators, media, and the public at large in the U.S. have increasingly been concerned about racial disparities in officers' issuing traffic tickets. Ascertaining the extent to which an observed disparity reflects racial bias is the crucial issue. First, we use a...

This paper studies how punishment for past offenses affects future compliance behavior and isolates deterrence effects mediated by learning. Using administrative data from speed cameras that capture the full driving histories of more than a million cars over several years, we evaluate responses...

This paper studies how punishment for past offenses affects future compliance behavior and isolates deterrence effects mediated by learning. Using administrative data from speed cameras that capture the full driving histories of more than a million cars over several years, we evaluate responses...

We estimate the effect of the level of fines on payment compliance and revenues collected from speeding tickets. Exploiting discontinuous increases in fines at speed cutoffs and reform induced variation in these discontinuities, we implement two complementary regression discontinuity designs....

Recent empirical studies have revealed prejudice based on country of origin in the Swiss naturalization system before courts banned closed ballot voting in 2003. Although the switch to elected councils has ameliorated the situation for the discriminated applicant groups, little has been known...

The “End Racial Profiling Act of 2001” (ERPA) states that “nolaw enforcement agent or law enforcement agency shall engage in racial profiling” andmandates states to “collect detailed data on stops, searches, seizures, and arrests.” Wedevelop a stylized dynamic model of highway...

Recent empirical studies have revealed prejudice based on country of origin in the Swiss naturalization system before courts banned closed ballot voting in 2003. Although the switch to elected councils has ameliorated the situation for the discriminated applicant groups, little has been known...