This paper evaluates the effect on crime of creating a fundamental modern-day institution: centralized professional police forces tasked with preventing crime. We study the 1829 formation of the London Metropolitan Police - the first professional force worldwide. Using newly digitized and...

This paper assesses whether perceived punishment severity changes discontinuously when an individual becomes an adult in the eyes of the courts. I find that the perceived chance of jail increases by 5.2 percentage points at the age of criminal majority, which is over and above the general effect...

The vast majority of death penalty studies use geographically or temporally aggregated data. Such aggregation can make it virtually impossible to identify small amounts of variation in homicides due to executions. Therefore, this study uses data that are disaggregated down to daily and city...