We examine the effect of medical marijuana laws (MML) on crime treating the introduction of MML as a quasi-experiment and using three different data sources. First, using data from the Uniform Crime Reports, we find that violent crimes such as homicides and robberies decrease in states that...

This paper provides a county-level investigation of the root causes of gun violence in the U.S. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple theoretical model which suggests that firearm-related offenses in a given county increase with the number of illegal guns and decrease with social...

It is difficult to know if racial discrepancies in police stop and search data are caused by racial bias or statistical discrimination. In part, this is due to uncertainty over the benchmark of unbiased police behavior: do officers aim to maximize arrests or to minimize crime? In this paper, I...

This paper provides a county-level investigation of the root causes of gun violence in the U.S. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple theoretical model which suggests that firearm-related offenses in a given county increase with the number of illegal guns and decrease with social...

We analyze a sample of 47 major US cities to illuminate the mechanisms that lead Right-to-Carry concealed handgun laws to increase crime. The altered behavior of permit holders, career criminals, and the police combine to generate 29 and 32 percent increases in firearm violent crime and firearm...

This paper studies the language used in television news broadcasts to describe police killings in the United States from 2013-19. We begin by documenting that the media is significantly more likely to use several language structures - e.g., passive voice, nominalization, intransitive verbs -...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

In the late 1820s, when British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel introduced legislation into the British parliament to create the very first police department, the phrase that the ‘police are the public, and the public are the police' was developed to allay public fears that the new institution...

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that have a sustained detrimental effect on their wages and career...

This paper compares actual US crime and incarceration rates to predicted rates from cross-country regressions. Global cross-country regressions of crime and incarceration on background characteristics explain much of the variation between other countries. But the estimated models predict only...