The efficacy and fairness of cash bail in promoting public safety has been a prominent policy question in recent years, but it is difficult to rigorously estimate the effects of bail, particularly at the state level, because of a lack of exogenous variation. California responded to the COVID...

There is a clear consensus that childhood experiences shape adult success, yet there is limited understanding of their impact on future generations. We proxy parental investments during childhood with birth order and study whether disadvantages due to lower investments are transmitted to future...

This study investigates the long-term relationship between slavery and violent crime in the USA. Although qualitative evidence suggests that slavery perpetuated violence, there has been no large-N study supporting this claim. Using county-level data, we find that the percentage of slaves in the...

Research studying connections between crime and education is a prominent aspect of the big increase of publication and research interest in the economics of crime field. This work demonstrates a crime reducing impact of education, which can be interpreted as causal through leveraging research...

There is extensive evidence of the impact of natural resource windfalls on violence. However, most of the literature focuses on civil conflict and civil wars and less is known about how resource booms affect other forms of violence and crime. In this paper, I examine the impact of Mexico’s...

We study spillover effects within co-offending networks by leveraging deaths of co-offenders for causal identification. Our results demonstrate that the death of a co-offender significantly reduces the criminal activities of other network members. We observe a decaying pattern in the magnitude...

Gender inequality and discrimination still persist, even though the gender gap in the labor market has been gradually decreasing. This study examines the effect of the #MeToo movement on judges’ gender gap in their vital labor market outcome - judicial decisions on randomly assigned legal...

This paper investigates the effect of Venezuelan transit migration on crime rates in Colombia. We exploit the reopening of the Venezuela-Colombia border in 2016, which has led to a surge in transit migration, and geospatial information about the distinct routes through which the migrants crossed...

It has been demonstrated that violent crime has profound effects on a number of socioeconomic outcomes. But, does day-to-day crime also shape human capital accumulation? We answer this question in the Indian context by combining multiple years of district-level data on the incidence of various...

We investigate the effect of having a child on parents' criminal behavior using rich administrative data from Brazil. Fathers' criminal activity sharply increases by up to 10% during the pregnancy period, and by up to 30% two years after birth, while mothers experience only a transitory decline...

We investigate the effect of having a child on parents’ criminal behavior using rich administrative data from Brazil. Fathers’ criminal activity sharply increases by up to 10% during the pregnancy period, and by up to 30% two years after birth, while mothers experience only a transitory...

Despite intense policy debates, the relationship between social welfare and refugee crime remains understudied. Taking steps to address this gap, our study focuses on Switzerland, where mobility restrictions on exogenously assigned refugees coincide with cantons’ autonomy in setting social...

This paper estimates the impacts of religiosity on criminal activity using a city-wide shock to religious sentiment from a 2015 Papal visit. Using daily data on all reported offences between 2010 and 2015 in Philadelphia at the census tract level and a difference-in-differences approach, we...

We examine the impact of a six-fold increase in the global vanilla price on smallholder vanilla-farming households in Madagascar. The price increase leads to sizable gains in household assets and significant improvements in adult psychological well-being, cognitive performance, and optimism...

We employ a unique 10-year panel dataset from California to examine both the effect crime has on homelessness as well as the effect homelessness has on crime. Our main estimator accounts for endogeneity by incorporating dynamics, controlling for time invariant unobserved heterogeneity, and...

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over the first five years. We show that...

In many developing and emerging economies, frequent power outages are often a consequence of electricity rationing, stemming from the insufficient generation capacity to meet peak demand. In an effort to minimize the disruption caused by sudden power outages, utilities often implement scheduled...

Two groups produce a network good perceived by a third party, such as a police or military institution, as a "public bad", referred to as "crime" for simplicity. These two groups, considered mafias, are assumed to be antagonists, whether they are enemies or competitors in the same market,...

This study investigates the relationship between social vulnerability, illegal activities, and location-based business disruptions in Athens, the capital of Greece. The research utilises repeated cross-sectional data from 2008, 2014, and 2023, gathered from areas with high levels of criminal...

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over the first five years. We show that...

n recent decades, the global debate on gun control has been prominent, with many countries adopting more restrictive policies. Brazil followed this trend by implementing stringent measures in 2003; however, the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in 2019 introduced normative changes aimed at facilitating...

Research studying connections between crime and education is a prominent aspect of the big increase of publication and research interest in the economics of crime field. This work demonstrates a crime reducing impact of education, which can be interpreted as causal through leveraging research...

When decision-makers overemphasize salient features under limited attention, biased decisions can result in settings in which decisions should be unbiased. We exploit a sudden shock in the salience of individuals of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands to test the vulnerability of decisions of...

In this article we study the effects of permanent school closures on crime. We leverage the closure of over 300 schools in Scotland between the school years 2006/07 and 2018/19, and employ a staggered difference-in-differences design on a matched sample. We find that neighbourhoods affected by...

We study the labor market impacts of retroactively reducing felonies to misdemeanors in San Joaquin County, CA, where criminal justice agencies implemented Proposition 47 reductions in a quasi-random order, without requiring input or action from affected individuals. Linking records of...

Criminal activity is seasonal, peaking in the summer and declining through the winter. We provide the first evidence that arrests of children and reported crimes involving children follow a different pattern: peaking during the school year and declining in the summer. We use a regression...

Recent political instability in the Middle East has triggered one of the largest influxes of refugees into Europe. The different departure points along the Turkish coast generate exogenous variation in refugee arrivals across Greek islands. We construct a new dataset on the number and nature of...

Criminal activity is seasonal, peaking in the summer and declining through the winter. We provide the first evidence that arrests of children and reported crimes involving children follow a different pattern: peaking during the school year and declining in the summer. We use a regression...

Recent political instability in the Middle East has triggered one of the largest influxes of refugees into Europe. The different departure points along the Turkish coast generate exogenous variation in refugee arrivals across Greek islands. We construct a new dataset on the number and nature of...

This study analyses the dynamic impact of income inequality and unemployment on crime in a panel of 15 African countries during the period 1994-2019 using four models: the panel vector autoregression model, the generalized method of moments model, the fixed-effect model, and machine learning....

We use seasonal ARIMA methods to study the imposition and removal of national uniform social distancing restrictions in response to Covid-19 in New Zealand for six crime types in six cities. We then use the estimated models to forecast counterfactual crime trajectories. Novel elements include...