Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...

Sanctions are a common method to discourage free-riding in the provision of public goods. However, we can usually only sanction those who are detected performing the bad act of free-riding. There has been considerable research on the type of sanctions imposed, but this research almost always...

This paper utilizes a spatial competition model to analyze criminal activity. Criminals are heterogeneous in their cost of providing illegal goods and compete by choosing a location and a price for the distribution of the illegal goods to clients. The locational choice of criminals and law...