We hypothesize the failure of government to protect the rights of individuals from violence committed by youths has led to the formation of youth gangs as protective agencies. Our theory predicts an opposite direction of causality between gang activity and violent crime than is widely accepted....

We hypothesize the failure of government to protect the rights of individuals from violence committed by youths has led to the formation of youth gangs as protective agencies. Our theory predicts an opposite direction of causality between gang activity and violent crime than is widely accepted....

Empirical evidence reveals that unemployment tends to increase property crime but that it has no effect on violent crime. To explain these facts, we examine a model of criminal gangs and suggest that there is a substitution effect between property crime and violent crime at work. In the model,...

This paper develops a model of the war against illegal drugs in both producer and consumer countries. The paper studies the trade-off faced by the government of the drug consumer country between prevention policies (aimed at reducing the demand for drugs) and enforcement policies (aimed at...

Empirical evidence reveals that unemployment tends to increase property crime but that it has no effect on violent crime. To explain these facts, we examine a model of criminal gangs and suggest that there is a substitution effect between property crime and violent crime at work. In the model,...

We analyse property crime in an economy composed of a large number of heterogeneous individuals who need to protect themselves. The crime equilibrium is modeled as a free-access equilibrium in which the match between criminals and victims equates the average returns to crime. The supply and...

This paper analyzes the deterrent effects of both border patrol agents and increased U.S.-Mexico fencing on reported crime rates in U.S. cities located along the border, between 1992 and 2017. We find that, for cities along the U.S.-Mexico border, increases in the number of border patrol agents,...

Most studies examining the impact of migrants on crime rates in hosting populations are in the context of economic migrants in developed countries. However, we know much less about the crime impact of refugees in low- and middle-income countriesâ whose numbers are increasing worldwide. This...

We test whether immigrants are more prone to support terror than natives because of lower opportunity costs, using the international World Values Survey data. We show that, in general, economically, politically and socially non-integrated persons are more likely to accept using violence for...

We use rich microdata on bank robberies to estimate individual-level disutilities of imprisonment. The identification rests on the money versus apprehension trade-off that robbers face inside the bank when deciding whether to leave or collect money for an additional minute. The distribution of...