We analyze the outcomes of 332 cases from a labor court in Mexico in which a judge awarded money to a plaintiff who claimed to have been fired by a firm without cause. The judgments were enforced in only 40% of the cases. A plaintiff may try to enforce a judgment by petitioning the court to...

We explore the relationship between litigation rates and the number of lawyers, in a typical supplier-induced demand (SID) frame. Drawing on an original panel dataset for the 169 Italian courts of justice between 2000 and 2007, we first document that the number of lawyers is positively...

We investigate the causal effect of the asymmetric criminalization of prostitution on sex tourism. We exploit legal reforms in five countries that switched from systems where prostitution was legal (Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada), or where only buying sex was legal (France), to the "Nordic...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

Crime levels are a perennial development problem in Latin America and a renewed concern in the United States. At the same time, trust in the police has been falling, and questions abound about citizens' willingness to support government efforts to fight crime. We conduct a survey experiment to...

This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique dataset of all felony trials in Sarasota County, Florida between 2004 and 2009. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random...