China's birth control in the late 20th century remains one of the most controversial social experiments in history, with profound and persistent impacts. This paper unmasks the underlying incentives for various population policies and their enforcement across time and space. I undertake a batter...

Child trafficking is a long-lasting social issue in China. We argue that abducted children increase as an indirect and unintended consequence of improved urban infrastructure, such as the construction of expressways that facilitate the expedient transfer of victims between cities. To identify...

We test whether immigrants are more prone to support terror than natives because of lower opportunity costs, using the international World Values Survey data. We show that, in general, economically, politically and socially non-integrated persons are more likely to accept using violence for...

We use a recent policy experiment in Rio de Janeiro, the installation of permanent police stations in low-income communities (or favelas), to quantify the relationship between a reduction in crime and the change in the prices of nearby residential real estate. Using a novel data set of detailed...

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity – country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion – among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...

We use data from a unique survey of members of drug-trafficking gangs in favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to characterize drug-trafficking jobs and study the selection into gangs, analyzing what distinguishes gang-members from other youth living in favelas. We also estimate wage...

This study employs state-level panel data to examine the effect of income inequality on crime in the United States. Using panel cointegration techniques, we find a significant negative effect of inequality on crime.

Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women in India. Our evidence suggests that this increase is good news, driven primarily by...

According to the culture of honor hypothesis, the high prevalence of homicide in the US South originates from the settlement of the region by herders from the fringes of Britain in the late 18th century. Combining contemporary homicide data with historical Census data, this paper confirms that...

This research extends simple two-sector models in order to inquire the impact of the extent of coverage or enforcement of minimum wage legislation in one of the sectors on the equilibrium outcome. Two versions of institutional wage avoidance are presented. They may be seen as representing...