The role of social safety nets in the form of redistributional transfers and wage subsidies is analyzed using a simple model of criminal behavior. It is argued that public welfare programs act as a crime--preventing or disruption--preventing devices because they tend to increase the opportunity...

In this paper I try to move away from the Extreme Bounds method of identifying ``robust'' empirical relations in the economic growth literature. Instead of analyzing the extreme bounds of the estimates of the coefficient of a particular variable, I analyze the entire distribution. My claim in...

Many political economic theories use and emphasize the process of voting in their explanation of the growth of Social Security, government spending, and other public policies. But is there an empirical connection between democracy and Social Security program size or design? Using some new...