<title>Abstract</title> Although the homeownership rate rose from 65 percent in 1995 to 69 percent in 2005, this rise appears difficult to sustain. We argue that the development of new shared‐equity mortgages (SEMs) that blur the lines between debt and equity would propel further advances in homeownership....

The production of cocaine and heroin, the two most important drugs economically, has been concentrated in a small number of poor nations for 25 years. A slightly larger number of developing nations have been affected by large-scale trafficking in these two drugs. This paper reviews what is known...

The standard model of markets for illicit drugs predicts that tougher enforcement against sellers will raise prices; yet cocaine and heroin prices have fallen substantially during a period of massive increases in enforcement. We present a model in which the basic mechanisms at work in the...

Deterrence theory proposes that legal compliance is influenced by the anticipated risk of legal sanctions. This implies that changes in law will produce corresponding changes in behavior, but the marijuana decriminalization literature finds only fragmentary support for this prediction. But few...

The book provides the first collection of analytic contributions, as opposed to advocacy essays and black box estimates, on illicit financial flows (IFFs). Some of the chapter presents new empirical findings; others, new conceptual insights. All of them enrich the understanding of the dynamics...