This paper studies the socio-economic and demographic determinants of crime in Spain. We estimate a crime equation using a panel dataset of Spanish provinces from 1993 to 1999 and applying the GMM-system estimator. Results indicate that lagged crime rate, clearance rate, urbanisation rate and...

This paper studies the non-market effects of education on crime using a panel dataset for the 20 Italian regions over the period 1980-1995. Our empirical results suggest that education reduces crime over and above its effect through labour market opportunities (employment rate and wage rate)....

In August 2006, the Italian government released one-third of the nation's prison inmates via a national collective pardon. We test for a discontinuous break in national crime rates corresponding to the mass release. We also test for the effect of the return of the incarceration rate to its...

In the last decades, Italian southern-based mafia organizations have expanded their sphere of influences to the traditionally immune Northern regions. We empirically investigate the channels that favored the diffusion of southern Italian mafias to the northern Italian provinces. We focus our...

This paper investigates to what extent youth alcohol consumption depends on consumption patterns by other household members and on social interactions outside the household. Exploiting the richness of the data, we explore the possibility of asymmetric social influences by gender and by age, the...