The single most important advance in the social sciences in the last 25 years has been the enormous improvements in the ability to analyze microdata in order to identify and quantify causal relationships. Some of these gains have come from technological progress, as the vast increases in...

This paper examines the development of the law and economics approaches to discrimination in employment. The early work of Gary Becker was used to argue against the need for antidiscrimination laws since the market would tend to discipline any firm that failed to maximize profits by harboring...

Improvements in educational attainment and in educational quality are universally acknowledged to be major contributors to Black economic progress in the Twentieth Century. The sources of these improvements are less well understood. Many scholars implicitly assume improvements in schooling...

We estimate the effects on employment and wages of wrongful-discharge protections in the United States. Over the last three decades, most U.S. state courts have adopted one or more common law wrongful-discharge doctrines that limit employers' discretion to terminate workers at-will. Using this...

This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights and empirical findings concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of...

We analyze a sample of 47 major US cities to illuminate the mechanisms that lead Right-to-Carry concealed handgun laws to increase crime. The altered behavior of permit holders, career criminals, and the police combine to generate 29 and 32 percent increases in firearm violent crime and firearm...

We study the opposing deterrent and enabling effects of guns carried by law-abiding citizens on violent crime, using the location of shooting ranges as an instrument. Our incident-level data based on admittedly imperfect data from the Gun Violence Archive suggests that defensive gun use (DGU) by...