People have subjective valuations of privacy. Thus, absent further considerations, efficiency requires that a person be afforded privacy if, and only if, his subjective valuation of privacy exceeds the social value of the information that would be disclosed through a violation of that person's...

Criminals often engage in costly avoidance to lower their probability of being detected and sanctioned. Such avoidance, in turn, affects the optimal enforcement policy. This paper studies the impact of avoidance on a specific type of enforcement policy - the standard of proof. We show that when...

There is no consensus in the economics of law enforcement literature regarding the likely effects of wrongful convictions on deterrence. While many assert that wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals are likely to cause similar reductions in deterrence, others, most notably Lando (2006),...

This article presents law enforcement models where employers engage in statistical discrimination, and the visibility of criminal records can be adjusted through policies (such as ban the box campaigns). I show that statistical discrimination leads to an increase in crime rates under plausible...

This paper examines factors affecting the decision of whether or not to make certain harmful acts illegal. It considers factors related both to the cost of law enforcement and to the crime commission decision. On the enforcement side, illegality is limited by the existence of fixed notice and...

Imprisonment and monetary rewards for non-convictions can similarly incentivize potential offenders to refrain from committing crime. Although imprisonment is expensive, it may still enjoy a cost advantage over rewards. This is because only detected criminals are imprisoned, whereas rewards need...

We consider a government’s interrelated decisions of enacting laws prohibiting harmful behavior and choosing how aggressively to enforce those laws. There are three broad policies available to the government in this regard: not prohibiting the act at all, enacting a law and enforcing it, and...

‘Proxy crimes’ is a phrase loosely used to refer to conduct which is punished only as a means to target another, harmful, conduct. Many criminal law scholars find the criminalization of this type of conduct unjustifiable from a retributivist perspective, whereas others note that proxy...