Psychological studies invariably find a positive relationship between violent video game play and aggression. However, these studies cannot account for either aggressive effects of alternative activities video game playing substitutes for or the possible selection of relatively violent people...

We conducted an experiment with 182 inmates from a maximum-security prison to analyze the impact of criminal identity on dishonest behavior. We randomly primed half of the prisoners to increase the mental saliency of their criminal identity, while treating the others as the control group. The...

Kriminalität kann in der Regel nicht unmittelbar wahrgenommen werden, sondern nur mittelbar über die Medienberichterstattung. Im Hinblick auf die wahrgenommene Bedrohungslage kommt insbesondere den lokalen und regionalen Abonnementzeitungen eine hohe Bedeutung zu. Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrags...

We develop a model in which two countries choose their enforcement levels non-cooperatively, in order to deter native and foreign individuals from committing crime in their territory. We assume that crime is mobile, both ex ante (migration) and ex post (fleeing), and that criminals who hide...

For nearly 50 years academics have been studying how labor markets affect crime. The initial interesting and important theoretical and empirical work generated substantial interest in studying crime among economists, in particular, and scholars in the social sciences more broadly. This...

Do criminals maximise money? Are criminals more or less selfish than the average subject? Can prisons apply measures that reduce the degree of selfishness of their inmates? Using a tried and tested tool from experimental economics, we cast new light on these old criminological questions. In a...

"Right to Buy" (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment by which incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the UK homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. This paper studies its impact on crime, showing...

Adding to the extensive political and legal debates on data retention, this is the first study to analyse the impacts of data retention on crime prevention in Europe. Using an estimator that captures dynamic effects and is robust to heterogeneous treatment effects, we find a significant negative...

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...

Estimating the effect of inequality on crime is challenging due to reverse causality and omitted variable bias. This paper addresses these concerns by exploiting the fact that, as suggested by recent scholarly research, the legacy of slavery is largely manifested in persistent levels of economic...