Punitive anti-crime policies in the Americas have contributed to steadily increasing rates of incarceration. This creates prison overcrowding and can lead to recidivism. Harsh penalties are often demanded by citizens, making them politically attractive for politicians. Yet the contextual...

Empirical evidence on the causes and effects of inequality suggests the existence of a vicious circle of mutually reinforcing inequality and corruption. Despite the broad empirical evidence, there are only a few formal theoretical models on these dynamics. Relying on a game-theoretic approach,...

Punitive anti-crime policies in the Americas have contributed to steadily increasing rates of incarceration. This creates prison overcrowding and can lead to recidivism. Harsh penalties are often demanded by citizens, making them politically attractive for politicians. Yet the contextual...

Guns save lives. Criminological data, studies of criminals, and natural experiments show that American citizens frequently use firearms, especially handguns, for lawful self-defense. Because defensive arms are common in American homes, occupied homes in the U.S. are burglarized at a much lower...

Police misconduct is at the top of the public policy agenda, but there is surprisingly little understanding of how police personnel management policies affect police misconduct. Police-civilian interactions in large jurisdictions are, in principle at least, highly regulated. However, these...

There is a deepening crisis in the funding of legal services in the United States. The House of Representatives has proposed cutting the budget of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), one of the main funders of legal assistance to America’s poor, to an all time low in inflation-adjusted...

This short piece discusses the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Palantir USG, Inc. v. United States, No. 17-1465 (Fed. Cir. September, 2018), affirming that “the Army failed to determine whether commercial items meet or could be modified to meet the agency’s needs and that, by failing to...

This book analyses access to public and private dispute resolution mechanisms within a sample of low/middle human development index (HDI) nations by using a law and economics approach that takes into account supply and demand-related factors. An empirical model is proposed and tested covering 18...

This paper tests predictions of a structural, augmented supply-of-offenders model regarding the relative effects of police, public prosecution and courts, respectively, on crime. Using detailed data on the different stages of the criminal prosecution process in Germany, empirical evidence...

Climate change has stimulated growing interest in the influence of temperature on cognition, mood and decision making. This paper is the first investigation of the impact of temperature on the outcomes of criminal court cases. It is motivated by Heyes and Saberian (2019, AEJ: Applied Economics),...