We test for the existence of gender bias in power relationships. Specifically, we examine whether police officers are less likely to issue traffic tickets to men or to women during traffic stops. Whereas the conventional wisdom, which we document with surveys, is that women are less likely to...

John J. Donohue and Justin Wolfers [Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate, Stanford Law Review, vol. 58 (2005): 791-846] critique a number of recent econometric studies purporting to demonstrate a deterrent effect of capital punishment. Donohue and Wolfers argue that...

We present a simple model to analyze law enforcement problems in transition economies. Law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidance and a fiscal externality. We analyze two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem. A...

This essay is a new chapter in An Introduction to Law and Economics (Third Edition, forthcoming 2003). It discusses how the state should determine the length of a jail term to impose on an individual if he has committed a crime and how much to spend on trying to catch criminals. The analysis...

A common practice in the fields of education, mental health, and juvenile justice is to segregate problem youths in groups with deviant peers. Assignments of this sort, which concentrate deviant youths, may facilitate deviant peer influence and lead to perverse outcomes. This possibility adds to...

In the economic literature on law enforcement, the distinction between the probability of arrest and the probability of conviction is not explicit. However, detection does not necessarily imply punishment. This paper focuses on proving that punishment cannot be applied without preceding...

We estimate the "incapacitation effect" on crime using variation in Italian prison population driven by eight collective pardons passed between 1962 and 1995. The prison releases are sudden – within one day –, very large – up to 35 percent of the entire prison population – and happen...