We consider agents in a country in an early stage of transition from a planned to a market economy. As the transition is in progress, the nature of the government's policies are unknown to the agents. Property rights once held by the state have already been transferred to the agents, with each...

Empirical evidence reveals that unemployment tends to increase property crime but that it has no effect on violent crime. To explain these facts, we examine a model of criminal gangs and suggest that there is a substitution effect between property crime and violent crime at work. In the model,...

This paper offers a new argument for why a more aggressive enforcement of minor offenses ('zero-tolerance') may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both minor offenses and more severe crime. We develop a model of criminal subcultures in which people gain social status among their peers...

We estimate the causal effect of harsher speeding punishments on future driving behavior of cited drivers. To account for the fact that punishments are not randomly assigned, we leverage variation in ticket-writing practices across highway patrol officers in Florida. The fine associated with a...

Delinquents are embedded in a network of relationships. Social ties among delinquents are modeled by means of a graph where delinquents compete for a booty and benefit from local interactions with their neighbors. Each delinquent decides in a non-cooperative way how much delinquency effort he...

Researchers who study crime and justice have been forecasting a variety of outcomes for nearly a century. Perhaps the most well known are forecasts of behavior after release from prison. Other examples include forecasts of prison populations and time trends in crime. However, it is very...

We consider agents in a country in an early stage of transition from a planned to a market economy. As the transition is in progress, the nature of the government's policies are unknown to the agents. Property rights once held by the state have already been transferred to the agents, with each...

This paper develops a dynamic life-cycle equilibrium model of crime with hetero-geneous agents and human capital accumulation. Agents decide at each point in time whether to commit crimes by comparing potential gains from crime to the expected cost of punishment (determined from the probability...