In the post World War II period, most U.S. cities experienced large movements of population from the city centers to the suburbs. In this paper we provide causal evidence that this process of suburbanization can be explained by the rise of violent crime in city centers. We do so by proposing a...

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...

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...

The opioid epidemic and migration along the US–Mexico border are two of the most-debated policy issues in recent US politics. We show how these two topics are interlinked: the US opioid epidemic generated large Mexican migration flows. We exploit the fact that in 2010, a series of reforms to...

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...