Governments in Latin America raise little revenue from property taxation, despite arguments for its efficiency and equity. Adequate registry information would support consistent collection, but registries are costly to establish and maintain. Compared to tax collection, field experimental...

Cooperation problems are at the heart of many everyday situations. In this paper, we propose a very simple and light-handed mechanism to sustain cooperation and test its performance in a rich laboratory environment. The mechanism moderates cooperation by controlling experiences, more...

This study investigates the relationship between social media and homicide in a cross section of 148 countries for the year 2012. The empirical evidence is based on Ordinary Least Squares, Tobit and Quantile regressions. The findings from Ordinary Least Squares and Tobit regressions show a...

When do policies generate expressive or backlash effects? Recent economic models suggest that where a proscribed activity is prevalent, permissive laws liberalize attitudes toward partakers while increasing utility. The opposite occurs in communities where the proscribed activity is rare. To...

Geography and social links shape economic interactions. In industries, schools, and markets, the entire network determines outcomes. This paper analyzes a large class of games and obtains a striking result. Equilibria depend on a single network measure: the lowest eigenvalue. This paper is the...

When do policies generate expressive or backlash effects? Recent economic models suggest that where a proscribed activity is prevalent, permissive laws liberalize attitudes toward partakers while increasing utility. The opposite occurs in communities where the proscribed activity is rare. To...

In this paper, we investigate the distribution strategy of a software publisher. The user adoption context is characterized by uncertainty about quality (experience good)and heterogeneous piracy costs. Users can purchase or get unauthorized/illegal copies (digital piracy) of the software during...

Casual empirical observations reveal no systematic relationship between the overall crime rate and organized criminal activity. We develop a search-theoretic framework to study the interactions not only between formal labor and crime sectors but also between individual and organized crimes. In...

Uniform rules incur high aggregate compliance costs when agents are sufficiently heterogeneous. Despite this, uniformity remains a common feature in regulation. Focusing on the monitoring stage of enforcement, this paper highlights an underappreciated benefit of uniform rules. Uniformity of...

In democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues. This raises an important question: how strongly can media affect public perceptions? This paper uses a natural experiment – the staggered introduction of the Digital TV signal in Italy – to measure the...