The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony of-fenders committed on or after January 1, 1995. We examine the impact of this legislationon reported crime rates using different time series approaches. In particular, structuraltime series models are...

Rapidly growing prison population in the U.S. has led to an upsurge of interest in discerning the impact of this costly increase on crime rates. Estimates of impact vary. We find that both higher levels of imprisonment and increases in labor force participation of women are related to...

Contracts serve an important function: allocation of risks. In achieving this function, contractual parties routinely include a force majeure clause in their contracts to be excused from performance in the face of a supervening event. But what events qualify to excuse performance and how have...

This paper provides a long-term view by studying the effect of the underground or shadow economy on economic growth in the Unites States over the period 1870 to 2014. Shadow activities might spur or retard economic growth depending on their interactions with the formal sector and impacts on the...

The recently advanced space-time-autoregressive (ST-AR) model is used to forecast U.S., regional and state violent and property crime rates. The disaggregate state (Florida) violent crime model includes murder, rape, robbery, and assault and the property crime model, burglary, larceny, and motor...

The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony offenders committed on or after January 1, 1995. We examine the impact of this legislation on reported crime rates using different time series approaches. In particular, structural time series models are...