This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of political institutions in privatization. The empirical testing relies on a new political database with continuous and time-varying measures of the political-institutional setting, and of the partisan orientation of the executive. Using...

We investigate the effect of job loss and unemployment benefits on criminal behavior, exploiting individual-level data on the universe of workers and criminal cases in Brazil over the 2009-2017 period. We match workers displaced upon plausibly exogenous mass layoffs with...

I review recent developments in the economic analysis of crime, focusing in particular on organized crime and corruption. I first discuss the main challenges to the empirical identification of causal relationships – namely, measurement error due to endogenous reporting of crime and the fact...