The postwar Soviet-American relations, circumscribed to the so-called period of the Cold War, represent one of the most interesting and complex chapters of the contemporary universal history. This study aims at capturing some significant snapshots that marked the two world superpowers manner of...

Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing...

Emboldened by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration lost no time establishing a policy that authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," that is, torture and abuse. Cofer Black, head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, testified at a joint...

I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of murder in the United States (1900-2004). Separating out permanent from cyclical murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincides with documented waves of organized crime, internal tensions, breakdowns in...