"This paper considers the use of outcomes-based tests for detecting racial bias in the context of police searches of motor vehicles. It shows that the test proposed in Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) can also be applied in a more general environment where police officers are heterogenous in...

This paper investigates how different outcomes of criminal appeals impact crime deterrence. My panel data analysis (1997-2013) indicates that crime rates decrease when convictions are affirmed by the appellate court, as long as conviction rates are not too high. Crime rates are further found to...

Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses. So far there has been little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area. In this paper we report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor...

This article shows that private enforcement of the U. S. antitrust laws-which usually is derided as essentially worthless-serves as a more important deterrent of anticompetitive behavior than the most esteemed antitrust program in the world, criminal enforcement by the Antitrust Division of the...

We use a stylized model to show that, if transfers to the poor are founded on a security argument, there is a negative trade-off between law enforcement expenditures and criminality. In contrast, if transfers are based on altruism, the correlation between the same variables may appear positive....