Current research suggests that the crime-combating instrument sentence probability is more effective than sentence severity. However, the focus of the simultaneous (or very short-run) impact of the law enforcement policy on crime impedes a comparison of these two instruments with respect to...

Using a new dataset of Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. Our analysis is novel in two ways: first, we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity; second, we combine a new instrument with fixed effects to...