We document the extent of measurement errors in the basic data set on police used in the literature on the effect of police on crime. Analyzing medium to large U.S. cities over 1960-2010, we obtain measurement error corrected estimates of the police elasticity. The magnitudes of our estimates are similar to those obtained in the quasi-experimental literature, but our approach yields much greate...

Corruption often creates a “briber’s dilemma”: each of the “clients” competing for a rent allocated by a government official has an incentive to pay bribes to try to obtain preferential treatment, but they would all be better off if they could mutually commit not to pay bribes. This paper uses a model of linked games to show how informal relationships among the clients may enable them to enforc...

The study of how crime affects different income groups faces several difficulties. The first is that crime-avoiding activities vary across income groups. Thus, a lower victimization rate in one group may not reflect a lower burden of crime, but rather a higher investment in avoiding crime. A second difficulty is that, typically, only a small fraction of the population is victimized so that empi...

Thieves, Thugs, and Neighborhood Poverty This paper develops a model of crime analyzing how such behavior is associated with individual and neighborhood poverty. The model shows that even under relatively minimal assumptions, a connection between individual poverty and both property and violent crimes will arise, and moreover, “neighborhood” effects can develop, but will differ substantially in...

We document the extent of measurement errors in the basic data set on police used in the literature on the effect of police on crime. Analyzing medium to large U.S. cities over 1960-2010, we obtain measurement error corrected estimates of the police elasticity. The magnitudes of our estimates are similar to those obtained in the quasi-experimental literature, but our approach yields much greate...

Driving Forces Behind Informal Sanctions This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators’ punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a considerable amount of spiteful punishment on the cooperators. H...

This paper explores the results discussed in “A fine is a price” by Gneezy and Rustichini [2000a. A fine is a price. Journal of Legal Studies 29, 1–17] regarding the effect of fines on parents who collect their children late from day-care centers. We suggest a complementary explanation, analyzing a formal model that qualifies but does not lose the predictive power of the deterrence hypothesis. ...

The NBA provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high-pressure setting with referees making the type of splitsecond decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become evident. We find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race officiating crew than when o...

Under a great variety of legally relevant circumstances, people have to decide whether or not to cooperate, when they face an incentive to defect. The law sometimes provides people with sanctioning mechanisms to enforce pro-social behavior. Experimental evidence on voluntary public good provision shows that the option to punish others substantially improves cooperation, even if punishment is co...