The author traces back the origins of the Sicilian Mafia in the economic and social structure of Western Sicily. By contrasting the area to the relatively more developed and less corrupted Eastern part of the island, the author identifies the specific transition from Feudalism to Capitalism as...

The European market of counterfeit goods has become a subject of increasing concern for businesses, private firms and policymakers. With a growing demand in consumption for this kind of goods, each sector is damaged from the toy industries to the pharmaceuticals industry. This article is aimed...

La Reforma Procesal Penal iniciada en Chile el año 2000 entrega salidas al proceso que no existían en el antiguo ordenamiento legal. Este trabajo analiza empíricamente los determinantes de cuatro de estas nuevas salidas a las que pueden optar los fiscales: Acuerdos Reparatorios, Suspensión...

Escalating penalties for repeat offenders are a pervasive feature of punishment schemes in various contexts, but economic theory has had a hard time rationalizing the practice. This paper reviews the literature on escalating penalties, and then develops a theory based on uncertainty on the part...

This paper studies how community notification of criminal registries affects neighborhood behavior and shows that notification is not always optimal. Using a game-theoretic model of a neighborhood, I establish optimal information disclosure policies when law-abiding neighbors’ actions generate...

The author takes a critical look at the decision by the Constitutional Court ruling that Article 365 of the Penal Code cannot be considered unconstitutional, which forbids carnal relations with a person of the same sex who is older than 14 but younger than 18 years of age. In his critique, he...

The controversies surrounding gun control policies have recently moved to the forefront of public's attention in the United States and elsewhere. Since 2005, eighteen states in the United States have passed laws extending the right to self-defense with no duty to retreat to any place a person...

We examine the effect of increasing the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment rate on reducing violent and property crime rates, based on county-level panels of SUD treatment and crime data between 2001 and 2008 across the United States. To address the potential endogeneity of the SUD treatment...

We conducted an experiment with 182 inmates from a maximum security prison to analyze the impact of criminal identity salience on cheating. The results show that inmates cheat more when we exogenously render their criminal identity more salient. This effect is specific to individuals who have a...

This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Public Economic Theory</I>, 15(1), 77-93.<P> This paper develops a model in which individuals gain social status among their peers for being 'tough' by committing violent acts. We show that a high penalty for moderately violent acts...</p></i>