Childhood lead exposure can lead to psychological deficits that are strongly associated with aggressive and criminal behavior. In the late 1970s in the United States, lead was removed from gasoline under the Clean Air Act. Using the sharp state-specific reductions in lead exposure resulting from...

Using individual level data, this paper examines how and to what extent behavior and perception of those bringing lawsuit’s differ between large district courts (competitive lawyer market) and medium or small district ones (less competitive lawyer markets). The major findings are; (1) in medium...

Adopt a law on mediation and the mediator profession organization started and the idea that mediation is an important theme of the strategy for justice reform a priority in the Action Plan for implementing the judicial reform strategy 2005-2007. By adopting the law was intended to reduce the...

We explore the relationship between formal employment and recidivism using a dataset that follows every Norwegian resident released from prison in 2003 for several years. By the end of 2006, 27 percent are re-incarcerated. Using a Cox proportional hazard model that controls for a host of...

We investigate the effects of restrictive asylum policies on the number and group composition of asylum seekers. We model the choices of refugees and traffickers about whether to migrate and to apply for asylum. Counter-intuitively, restrictive asylum policies do not lead to a reduction in the...

This paper criticizes multicausal and penal impunity explanations of violence and crime. It shows the analytical limits of identifying state and social institutional failure with objective causes of violence. But also highlights that impunity indicators cannot be confused with impunity itself....

We document the existence of a gubernatorial election cycle in state executions, suggesting that election year political considerations play a role in determining the timing of executions. Our analysis indicates that states are approximately 25 percent more likely to conduct executions in...

This paper investigates causalities between small businesses and the shadow economy in ten New Member States of the European Union in the years 2000–2005. The transition from a centrally planned to a market economy, with deregulation and privatization of economic activities, has yielded new...

This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and affects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and...

The causes and consequences of corruption have attracted much attention in recent years by both academics and policy makers. Central in the discussion on the impact of corruption are perception-based indices. While informative, these indices are ordinal in nature and hence provide no indication...