Legalizing abortion can either increase or decrease investments in childrens human capital. This article finds that abortion increases the number of out-of-wedlock births. Using data that more directly links the criminal with age when the crime was committed, not age when arrested, and fixing...

It is frequently assumed that safe storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates are ignored. However, given existing work on the adverse impact of other safety laws, such as safety caps for storing medicine, even the very plausible...

"In the Grutter case, Justice O'Connor suggested that universities could justifiably try to enroll a "critical mass" of minority students. Enroll fewer than that "critical mass," reason some observers, and minority students will feel too marginalized to perform at their highest levels. In this...

This paper shows that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for Federal and state offices can be explained by higher government spending. This result holds for both Federal and state legislative campaigns and gubernatorial races and across many different specifications....

Much recent research in the economics of information has analyzed the implications of alternative market structures in the presence of qualitative characteristics which cannot be accurately and objectively measured or described. This approach avoids the more basic question of the influence of...

This paper examines the sizes of the fines, damage awards, remediation costs, and market value losses imposed on companies that violate environmental regulations. Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses, however,...

Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the...

Governments use public education and public ownership of schools and the media to control the information that their citizens receive. More totalitarian governments as well as those with larger wealth transfers make greater investments in publicly controlled information. This finding is borne...