This paper examines the economic and political conditions that influence people’s attitudes regarding a municipality break-up. The theoretical model predicts intra-municipal differences in tax bases, political preferences, and population size to affect the expected gain from secession. The...

This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases...

The question of whether laws affect attitudes has inspired scholars across many disciplines, but empirical knowledge is sparse. Using longitudinal survey data from Norway and Sweden, collected before and after the implementation of a Norwegian law criminalizing the purchase of sexual services,...

International trafficking in humans for sexual exploitation is an economic activity driven by profit motives, and up to four million people are estimated to be exploited by human traffickers each year. Laws regarding commercial sex influence the profitability of trafficking and may thus affect...

Using a larger and more representative sample than previous studies, we assess people’s attitudes toward prostitution in Norway and Sweden. Compared to previous statistical analyses in this field, the present study is the first to use sophisticated statistical methods that can shed further...

We investigate the efficiency and distributional consequences of a corruptionfighting initiative in Romania targeting the endemic fraud in a high-stakes high school exit exam, which introduced CCTV monitoring of the exam and credible punishment threats. We find that punishment coupled with...

How do government-supplied institutional benefits and the taxation and regulation of produc- ers affect the propensity of private firms to enter the unofficial economy and evade taxation? We propose a model in which the incentive of firms to operate underground depends on tax rates relative to...

In practice, targeted monitoring seems to be a strategy frequently used by regulators. In this paper, we study the effects of targeted monitoring strategies on the adoption of a new abatement technology and, consequently, on the aggregate emissions level when firms are regulated with uniform...