We analyze the impact on crime of 3.7 million refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors' offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered...

This paper offers a new argument for why a more aggressive enforcement of minor offenses ('zero-tolerance') may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both minor offenses and more severe crime. We develop a model of criminal subcultures in which people gain social status among their peers...

This article develops a Bayesian approach for estimating panel quantile regression with binary outcomes in the presence of correlated random effects. We construct a working likelihood using an asymmetric Laplace (AL) error distribution and combine it with suitable prior distributions to obtain...

Using data on 100 years of 19th century criminal trials at London's Old Bailey, this paper offers clear evidence of disparate treatment of Irish-named defendants and victims by English juries. We measure surname Irishness and Englishness using place of birth in the 1881 census. Irish-named...

The empirical literature testing the economic theory of crime has extensively studied the relative importance of the probability and the severity of punishment with reference to planned criminal activities. There are, however, also unplanned crimes and in this paper we focus on a very serious...

We evaluate the criminogenic effects of Universal Credit (UC), a monumental welfare reform designed to radically change the social security payment system in the United Kingdom. We exploit the UC rollout across constituencies using monthly data from 2010 to 2019 for England and Wales. We find UC...

Regulated marijuana markets are more common today than outright prohibitions across the U.S. states. Advocates for policies that would legalize marijuana recreational markets frequently argue that such laws will eliminate crime associated with the black markets, which many argue is the only link...

We provide evidence that perceptions of crime risk are severely biased for many years after a move to a new neighborhood. Based on four successive waves of a large crime survey, matched with administrative records on household relocations, we find that the longer an individual lives in a...

This paper studies the effects of introducing legal street prostitution zones on both registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where legal street prostitution zones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. We provide evidence that the...