Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing...

The author models the interaction between the “Center”, represented by inspectors, and free riders in local trains (“hares” in the Russian slang). In order to characterize the optimal deterring strategy of the Center, one must look into the nature the interaction among parties in this...

Using a model similar to labor market models of statistical discrimination, I de- scribe how and why racial profiling can arise even when law enforcement officers are racially unbiased. Specifically, if one racial group has a higher fraction of individuals who are at risk of committing the...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...

This paper modifies the optimal penalty analysis by incorporating investment incentives with external benefits. In the models examined, the recommendation that the optimal penalty should internalize the marginal social harm is no longer valid as a general rule. We focus on antitrust...

Utilizing an established economic framework grounded in Becker's (1981) path-breaking analysis of altruism and envy within the family, this paper explores the determinants of hate crimes, also known as bias-motivated crimes. Making use of a unique data set on hate crimes compiled by the FBI, we...

Moral concepts affect crime supply. This idea is modelled assuming that illegal activities is habit forming. We introduce habits in a intertemporal general equilibrium framework to illegal activities and compare its outcomes with a model without habit formation. The findings are that habit (i)...

Provided that the literature on th e deterrent effect of capital punishment is overall inconclu- sive, the fact that individual au thors persistently claim to have found solid evidence in one or the other direction raises two questions. Firstly, what are the causes for these different results?...

The deterrence of crime and its reduction through incapacitation are studied in a simple multiperiod model of crime and law enforcement. Optimal imprisonment sanctions and the optimal probability of sanctions are determined. A point of emphasis is that the incapacitation of individuals is often...

The paper investigates the effect of local economic conditions on crime. The study focuses on Italy�s local labor markets and analyzes the short-term response of crime to the severe slump of 2007-2009. It shows that the downturn led to a significant increase in economic-related offenses...