Violence is one of the leading social problems in the United States. The development of appropriate public policies to curtail violence is confounded by the relationship between alcohol and violence. In this paper, we estimate the propensity of alcohol control policies to reduce the perpetration...

The seasonal influenza virus afflicts between five and twenty percent of the U.S. population each year, imposing significant costs on those who fall ill, their families, employers, and the health care system. The flu is transmitted via droplet spread or close contact, and certain environments,...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and labor unions are unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010). In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the decision gave an electoral boost to...

Matching provisions in state clean elections acts have been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds (Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 2011). By modeling political speech as a costly advertising activity in an electoral contest, we...

We develop a counterterrorism model to analyze the effects of allowing a government agency to torture suspects when evidence of terrorist involvement is strong. We find that legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases has offsetting effects on agency incentives to counter terrorism by means...

We perform an econometric analysis of the determinants of sexual violence against women and reporting behavior by victims of sexual violence in the United States during the era of the women's movement. Drawing on the sexual competition theory of rape, we identify instruments that directly affect...

A simple model demonstrates that there is no theoretical connection between the extent of price discrimination and the extent of market power.