This paper studies interjurisdictional competition in the fight against crime and its impact on occupational choice and the allocation of capital. In a world where capital is mobile, jurisdictions are inhabited by individuals who choose to become workers or criminals. Because the return of the...

We consider the implications of ethical behaviour on the effect of a redistributive tax-transfer system. In choosing their labour supplies, individuals take into account whether their tax liabilities correspond to what they view as ethically acceptable. If tax liabilities are viewed as ethically...

Law enforcement is decentralized. It is so despite documented interjurisdictional externalities which would justify its centralization. To explain this fact, we construct a political economy model of law enforcement. Under decentralization, law enforcement in each region is in accord with the...

We develop a model of a competitive rental housing market with endogenous default due to income uncertainty. There is a large number of identical, potential suppliers who each face a fixed cost of entering the rental housing market. Those suppliers who choose to enter decide how many rental...

We study whether social welfare recipients may end up paying more for their grocery if social welfare payments are more concentrated over time. We first present a theoretical model showing that lower incomes in general and a lower lower bound of the income distribution lead to less mobility for...

A two-region economy consists of a given but different number of immobile workers in each region, and a given number of mobile firms. Firms create jobs where they locate, but there is frictional unemployment. Two sorts of agglomeration effects arise: those from economies of scale in matching,...

We consider a world in which the mode of food production, foraging or agriculture, is endogenous, and in which technology grows exogenously. Within a model of coalition formation, we allow individuals to rationally form cooperative communities (bands) of foragers or farmers. At the lowest levels...

We combine the choice data of proposers and responders in the ultimatum game, their expectations elicited in the form of subjective probability questions, and the choice data of proposers ("dictators") in a dictator game to estimate a structural model of decision making under uncertainty. We use...

The role of field experiments in evaluating the effect of compensation policies on worker productivity is considered. Particular attention is paid to the ability of a field experiment to identify the effect of a permanent change in firm policy. While field experiments solve endogeneity problems...

We use the Vietnam War draft avoidance behavior documented by Card and Lemieux (2002) as a quasi-natural experiment to infer causation from education to smoking and find strong evidence that education, whether it be measured in years of completed schooling or in educational attainment...