This Paper aims to explain the spatial variations of crime, both between and within cities. Two types of mechanisms are put forward: social interactions that stipulate that an individual is more likely to commit crime if his peers commit than if they do not commit crime; and distance to jobs that...

The dispute resolution procedures of the World Trade Organization allow sanctions to be imposed when a country is unwilling to bring a WTO-inconsistent trade measure into conformity. Apart from the fact that the procedure for triggering the retaliation process has ambiguities that need to be...

Australia’s policies towards asylum seekers hit the headlines when it refused to admit those aboard the Tampa in September 2001. This tough stance and the raft of legislation that followed became known as Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’. It was clearly intended to deter those who might...

This paper analyses the interplay between social structure and information exchange in two competing activities, crime and labour. We consider a dynamic model in which individuals belong to mutually exclusive two-person groups, referred to as dyads. There are multiple equilibria. If jobs are...

How does information technology (IT) affect the organization of police work? How does it in turn affect police crime-fighting effectiveness? To answer these questions, we construct a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. We find that while IT adoption had substantial...

We analyse the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and...

When a customer can borrow from several competing banks, multiple lending raises default risk. If creditor rights are poorly protected, this contractual externality can generate novel equilibria with strategic default and rationing, in addition to equilibria with excessive lending or...

First we show that for wealth-constrained agents who may commit an act twice, the optimal sanctions are the offender's entire wealth for the first crime, and zero for the second. Then we ask whether this decreasing sanction scheme is subgame perfect (time consistent), i.e., does a rent-seeking...

The United States has a teenage birth rate that is high relative to that of other developed countries, and falling more slowly. Children of teenagers may experience difficult childhoods and hence be more likely to commit crimes subsequently. I assess to what extent lagged teen birth rates can...

For the first time, we present evidence on employee theft in the UK using data on actual recorded crime. We present a model where employees are ‘rational cheaters’ with ‘consciences’ to produce hypotheses about the role of labour market (wages, unemployment) and social (age, education)...