A key issue in the debate over gun control is how it will affectthe relative incentives of criminals and law-abiding citizens to acquireguns. We propose a simple model of interaction of criminals and law-abiding citizens as a contest where the parties arm themselves in orderto improve their...

Economists generally assume that the state has sufffcient institutional capacityto support markets and levy taxes, assumptions which cannot be taken forgranted in many states, neither historcally nor in today’s developing world.Our paper develops a framework where "policy choices" in market...

We study the effect of fair institutions on growth. In our model, individuals are endowed with unequal entitlements to theeconomy’s output. They can free-ride or cooperate. Cooperation is individually costly, but increases aggregate output and growth.Experimentally, we observe significantly...

We model a simple justice system in which a court is mandated by society to assess the guilt and the punishment of an accused. The court takes prison facilities as given and neglects its impact on the cost to society of implementing the sentence. Clearly, the court, in this world, will condemn...

We use a stylized model to show that, if transfers to the poor arefounded on a security argument, there is a negative trade-off betweenlaw enforcement expenditures and criminality. In contrast, if transfersare based on altruism, the correlation between the same variables mayappear positive. We...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional lossesare from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death ofa child; the third-worst is the death of a parent...

Woman surage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States.Before World War I, however, surage states remained almost exclusively conned to theAmerican West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studyingthe timing of woman surage adoption...

This paper agrees that a suitably generalized Darwinism may help understandsocioeconomic change, but finds the most publicized generalization by Hodgson and Knudsenunsuitable. To do better, it generalizes the extension of Neo-Darwinism into evolutionarydevelopmental biology (“evo-devo”),...

This essay discusses the policy debate concerning optimal taxation and the distribution of income.It begins with a brief overview of trends in income inequality, the leading hypothesis to explain thesetrends, and the distribution of the tax burden. It then considers the framework that economists...

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relativewage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of jobsatisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positionswithin their firms are on average more...