There is no consensus in the economics of law enforcement literature regarding the likely effects of wrongful convictions on deterrence. While many assert that wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals are likely to cause similar reductions in deterrence, others, most notably Lando (2006),...

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...

Research in criminology has shown that the perceived risk of apprehension often differs substantially from the true level. To account for this insight, we extend the standard economic model of law enforcement (Becker, 1968) by considering two types of offenders, sophisticates and naïves. The...

American criminal law treats the inchoate crimes of attempt, conspiracy, and solicitation as substantive offenses punishable by criminal sanctions. The legal system criminalizes the types. of behavior that constitute these offenses to intervene before an actor completes the intended illegal act....

The trade-off between the immediate returns from committing a crime and the future costs of punishment depends on an offender's time discounting. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sentence length generated by a large collective pardon in Italy and provide non-parametric evidence on the...

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...