Systematic discrimination and violence against minorities are enduring phenomena. This paper investigates the role of racist narratives in sustaining discriminatory attitudes and collective violence against the Black population in the United States South from 1865 to today. Leveraging plausible...

Using new data at the police department level, I propose an identification strategy to estimate the causal effect that police militarization has on reducing violent crime. I show that previous estimates are likely to be contaminated by unobserved factors that simultaneously determine...

Is dishonest behavior contagious? We answer this question by studying whether corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal while using a self-service checkout system. Crucially, this system allows shoppers to engage in dishonest behavior by under-reporting the...

Violent organizations are often providers of many social services in competition with the state. We provide evidence that these organizations use the provision of social services to gain support. This strategy is only effective when it fills the void left by a weak state. We show this by...