The issue of internal security has become increasingly complex over the past decades. As there is an increasing overlap between private and public provision of security, the question of how to allocate responsibility for security between the public sphere (state) and the private sphere has...

We contribute to the long debate on whether export commodity revenues can lead to economic development by studying the consequences of the nearly six-fold increase in the global price of vanilla on vanilla farming communities in Madagascar. We find a substantial increase in the wealth and...

We run several experiments which allow us to compare cooperation under perfect and imperfect information and under a centralized and decentralized punishment regime. We nd that (1) centralization by itself does not improve cooperation and welfare compared to an informal, peer-to-peer punishment...

Twenty years ago Glacier National Park was considered the park most at risk from external threats, such as mining and timber harvesting on adjacent lands. This finding led to an earlier Article that examined whether Glacier officials were effectively defending the park from these external...

Guns save lives. Criminological data, studies of criminals, and natural experiments show that American citizens frequently use firearms, especially handguns, for lawful self-defense. Because defensive arms are common in American homes, occupied homes in the U.S. are burglarized at a much lower...

We run several experiments which allow us to compare cooperation under perfect and imperfect information and under a centralized and decentralized punishment regime. We find that (1) centralization by itself does not improve cooperation and welfare compared to an informal, peer-to-peer...

It is often conjectured that non-state dispute resolution blossoms when state courts are not independent or are perceived as low-quality courts. This conjecture implies a substitutive relationship between state and non-state dispute resolution. An alternative hypothesis argues that both the...

The issue of internal security has become increasingly complex over the past decades. As there is an increasing overlap between private and public provision of security, the question of how to allocate responsibility for security between the public sphere (state) and the private sphere has...

Police misconduct is at the top of the public policy agenda, but there is surprisingly little understanding of how police personnel management policies affect police misconduct. Police-civilian interactions in large jurisdictions are, in principle at least, highly regulated. However, these...

From the point of view of institutional economics, property rights are an instrument to shape individual incentives efficiently. For the case of a Tullock contest with endogenously determined rent, I analyze the circumstances under which perfectly secure property rights emerge in an economy...