Although modern societies generally entrust enforcement of the criminal law to public prosecutors, most crimes in pre-modern societies were prosecuted privately by the victim or a relative. This article is the first rigorously quantitative analysis of private prosecution. It focuses on...

This paper seeks to make three contributions to understanding how banks' executive pay has produced incentives for excessive risk-taking and how such pay should be reformed. First, although there is now wide recognition that pay packages focused excessively on short-term results, we analyze a...

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...