Recently many papers have used the arrest rate to measure punishments in crime-rate regressions. However, arrest rates account for only a portion of the criminal sanction. Conviction rates and time served are theoretically important, but rarely used, and excluding them generates omitted variable...

This paper examines the effects of Georgia's merit-based HOPE Scholarship on college enrollments. Until the late 1980s, only a small fraction of total student aid was allocated on the basis of merit, but in the last decade state governments have stepped in,distributing billions of dollars in...

The labor market prospects of young, unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s. Crime rates show a reverse pattern: increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s. Since young, unskilled men commit most crime, this paper seeks to establish a causal relationship...

We use data for 436 rural districts from the 2001 Census of India to examine whether different aspects of social divisions help explain the wide variation in access to tap water across rural India. Studies linking social fragmentation to public goods usually aggregate different types of...

A common justification for HOPE-style merit-aid programs is to promote and reward academic achievement, thereby inducing greater investments in human capital. However, grade-based eligibility and retention rules encourage other behavioral responses. Using data extracted from the longitudinal...

In the last fifteen years there has been a significant increase in merit aid. Coincident with this increase in merit aid has been increased attention to sorting in various aspects of life, especially in education. This paper examines the extent to which merit-based aid exacerbates or ameliorates...

Punitive damages are a controversial aspect of tort litigation and have been the subjct of numerous theoretical, empirical, and experimental studies. Critics have argued that the uncertainty and unpredictability that punitive damages claims inject into a case may increase the rate and amount of...

For nearly 50 years academics have been studying how labor markets affect crime. The initial interesting and important theoretical and empirical work generated substantial interest in studying crime among economists, in particular, and scholars in the social sciences more broadly. This...

We examine the relationship between casinos and crime using county-level data for the US between 1977 and 1996. Casinos were non-existent outside Nevada before 1978, and expanded to many other states during our sample period. Most factors that reduce crime occur before or shortly after a casino...

Insurance fraud, which adds an estimated $85 billion per year to the total insurance bill in the U.S., is an extremely serious problem for consumers, regulators, and insurance companies. This paper analyzes the effects of state legislation and market conditions on automobile insurance fraud from...