The Effects of Enforcement on Illegal Markets: Evidence from Migrant Smuggling along the Southwestern Border This paper analyzes how enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border has affected the market for migrant smugglers. Using a unique dataset that links border crossing histories from illegal Mexican migrants to aggregate enforcement and punishment statistics, we find that the effect of enforc...

This paper uses annual data from 1980-1998 to test two models of the relationship between wholesale and retail marijuana prices. Results from regressions of retail prices on wholesale prices reject a multiplicative model, in which the difference in prices between levels is proportional to the wholesale price, in favor of an additive model, in which the price difference is a fixed amount. This f...

Autonomic computing systems are designed to be self-diagnosing and self-healing, such that they detect performance and correctness problems, identify their causes, and react accordingly. These abilities can improve performance, availability, and security, while simultaneously reducing the effort and skills required of system administrators. One way that systems can support these abilities is by...

Autonomic computing systems are designed to be self-diagnosing and self-modifying, such that they notice performance and correctness problems, pinpoint their causes, and react accordingly. These abilities can increase performance, uptime, and security, while simultaneously reducing the effort and knowledge required of system administrators. One way that systems can support these abilities is by...

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...

We report a vehicle-fleet experiment with an economic incentive for keeping within speed limits using a speed-alert device. A traffic insurance scheme was simulated with a monthly bonus during two months reduced by a non-linear speeding penalty. Participants were randomly assigned into four treatment and two control groups. A third control group consists of drivers who had the device and were m...

This paper considers the possibility of collective action by the business community to counter corruption in the award of government licenses and contracts. The analogy is with contract enforcement institutions studied by economic historians and contract law scholars. The institution in this context comprises a no-bribery norm, a community system to detect violations, and a multilateral ostraci...

Adolescent Drug Use and the Deterrent Effect of School-Imposed Penalties Simple OLS estimates of the effect of school-imposed penalties for drug use on a student’s consumption of marijuana are biased if both are determined by unobservable school or individual attributes. The potential reverse causality is also a challenge to retrieving estimates of the causal relationship, as the severity of sc...

In this paper the employment of Scottish and English selfreporting drug users is considered using data drawn from the Scottish and British Crime Surveys. Univariate and bivariate estimates of the probability of being employed reveal a robustly negative and statistically significant association between a number of measures of drug use and current employment. These results hold for separate sampl...