In this paper we describe how we used online discussion forums to complement lecture presentations. We collected data on student usage and surveyed student opinion in several online/blended sections. Our hypothesis is that increased student participation in online discussion forums will increase...

Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity of access to the information about the names, personal characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and about the laws, local...

Marginal deterrence concerns the incentives created by criminal penalties for oenders to refrain from committing more harmful acts. We show that when offenders act sequentially, it is often optimal for the level of the sanction, not just the expected sanction, to rise with the severity of the...

India's colonial legacy and linguistic diversity give English an important role in its economy, and this role has expanded due to globalization in recent decades. In this paper, we use individual-level data from the India Human Development Survey, 2005 to quantify the effects of English-language...

This paper explores the mean-reverting behavior of the unemployment rate using monthly geographically disaggregated data for the period 1991:01 through 2012:02. We apply both standard unit-root tests and tests that allow for one and two structural breaks in the mean. We find evidence that favors...

This paper assesses the economic characteristics of the balance that federal law aims to achieve between the interests of paleontologists and amateur and commercial collectors of fossils on US federal lands. The objective function is taken to be the maximization of the social value of these...

Asset forfeiture laws allow the seizure of assets used in the commission of a crime. This paper examines the impact of such laws on deterrence by incorporating the possibility of asset forfeiture into the standard economic model of crime. When punishment is by a fine that can be optimally...

Throughout history, religious and political authorities have had a mysterious attraction to each other. Rulers have established state religions and adopted laws with religious origins, sometimes even claiming to have divine powers. We propose a political economy approach to theocracy, centered...

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A...

Proponents of energy service companies (ESCOs) argue that these firms provide a crucial instrument for delivering improved energy efficiency in public and private sectors, thus contributing to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction around the world. Do ESCOs reduce CO2 emissions? To answer...