In this paper, we pursue several strategies to identify the effect of unemployment rates on crime rates. Using a state-level panel for the period from 1971 to 1997, we estimate the effect of unemployment on the rates of seven felony offenses. We control extensively for state-level demographic and economic factors and estimate specifications that allow for state-specific time trends as well as s...

Medical marijuana laws generate significant policy debates regarding drug policy. In particular, if marijuana is a complement or a gateway drug to hard drugs, these laws would increase not only the usage of marijuana but hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In this paper, I empirically study the relationships between marijuana and cocaine or heroin by analyzing data on drug possession arrests...

Environmental crimes are unauthorized acts against the environment that are subject to criminal prosecution and sanction. While their deterrence e¤ect is largely unknown, policy is moving rapidly towards strengthening the role of criminal sanctioning in the context of environmental crime. This paper provides new evidence on the e¤ects of the use of criminal sanctions in environmental policy mak...

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using countyand state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevale...

Using staggered changes to debt contract enforcement costs in India, we estimate it’s causal effect on financing and asset maturity. A reduction in enforcement costs is associated with an increase in long-term debt and a decrease in short-term debt and trade-credit. The increase in debt maturity is confined to firms that borrow from multiple and diverse set of lenders and to smaller firms. Firm...

This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal indices to capture a range of potential conflicts between different stakeholders of the firm. It supplem...

We conduct laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of deterrence mechanisms under controlled conditions. The effect of the expected cost of punishment of an individual’s decision to engage in a proscribed activity and the effect of uncertainty on an individual’s decision to commit a violation are very difficult to observe in field data. We use a roadway speeding framing and find that ...

In the 1990s, while there was a large decline in property-related crime along the U.S.Mexico border, violent crime rates began to converge to the national average. At the same time, legal and illegal immigration from Mexico surged and border enforcement rose to unprecedented levels. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between border county crime rates, immigration and enforcement sin...

This paper examines race and police use of force using data on 1.6 million 911 calls in two cities, neither which allows for discretion officer dispatch. Results indicate White officers increase much more than minority when dispatched to neighborhoods. Estimates Black (Hispanic) civilians are 55 (75) percent likely experience any force, five times as a shooting, compared if scaled up similarly ...