We exploit the Collective Clemency Bill passed by the Italian Parliament in July 2006 to evaluate the indirect effects of a policy that randomly commutes actual sentences to expected sentences for 40 percent of the Italian prison population. We estimate the direct and indirect impact of the...

Deterrence institutions are widely used in modern societies to discourage rule violations but whether they have an impact beyond their immediate scope of application is usually ignored. Using a quasi-experiment, we found evidence of spillover effects across contexts. We identified fraudsters and...

What are the main causes of international terrorism? The lessons from the surge of academic research that followed 9/11 remain elusive. The careful investigation of the relative roles of economic and political conditions did little to change the fact that existing econometric estimates diverge...

In this paper, we take a comprehensive and multidisciplinary look at terrorism sentencing decisions over a 17-year period, between September 2001 when the ATA was first conceived of and September 2018. In so doing, we first offer an empirical analysis of the sentences for all terrorism offenses...

The major event of the 9/11 terror attacks is likely to have induced an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiments, not only among US residents but also beyond US borders. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and exploiting exogenous variation in interview...

Using nationally-representative household survey data and confidential geo-coded data on violence, we examine the linkages between conflict, food insecurity, and food price shocks in Afghanistan. Spatial mappings of the raw data reveal large variations in levels of food insecurity and conflict...

The existing literature on the determinants of terrorism treats terror as a uniform phenomenon and does not distinguish between different types of terror. This paper explicitly addresses the heterogeneity of terror by classifying groups according to their ideologies. We show that the pattern of...

This paper argues that terrorism, beyond its immediate impact on innocent victims, also raises the costs of crime, and therefore, imposes a negative externality on potential criminals. Terrorism raises the costs of crime through two channels: (i) by increasing the presence and activity of the...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

This paper analyses the effect of local crime rates on the mental well-being of residents. Our identification strategy addresses the problem of sorting, and endogenous moving behaviour. We find that crime causes considerable mental distress of residents, and that these effects are mainly driven...