Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001) develop a model of police search and offender behavior. Their model implies that if police are unprejudiced the rate of guilt should not vary across groups. Using data from Interstate 95 in Maryland, they find equal guilt rates for African-Americans and whites...

This paper analyzes the impact of corporate governance on firm value using a sequence of reforms in India (Clause 49) enacted in 2000, for which more severe penalties were introduced in 2004. The reforms did not apply to all firms and resulted in treatment and control groups of firms with...

This paper investigates the effects of the sources of candidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, with particular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrow base of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. An extensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions...

The divestiture of the House Appropriations Committee in the 1880's has received considerable attention of an empirical nature. This paper presents a formal model of legislative decisionmaking, using a common agency formulation to represent interest group lobbying of legislators. This framework...

This paper analyzes the factors influencing whether countries become tax havens. Roughly 15 percent of countries are tax havens; as has been widely observed, these countries tend to be small and affluent. This paper documents another robust empirical regularity: better-governed countries are...

This paper investigates how taxes influence portfolio choices by exploring the response to the distinctive treatment of foreign dividends in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA). JGTRRA lowered the dividend tax rate to 15% for American equities and extended this tax relief...

This paper analyzes how speech may influence behavior by revealing social attitudes. As our main example, we focus on the possible effect of hate speech on hate crime. In our model, potential offenders care about esteem conferred by like-minded individuals whose numbers are uncertain but can be...

This paper analyzes the conditions under which the level of hate speech (expressing hostility towards racial and other minorities) in society can influence whether individuals commit hate crimes against minorities. More generally, we explore the conditions under which speech can influence...

This paper analyzes whether the Congressional budget process (instituted in 1974) leads to lower aggregate spending than does the piece-meal appropriations process that preceded it. Previous theoretical analysis, using spatial models of legislator preferences, is inconclusive. This paper uses a...

The standard economic model of bilateral precaution postulates that the care that is taken by injurers and victims affects only expected accident loss. This paper considers situations in which each party’s precaution also directly affects the other party’s cost of taking precaution. When...