We use rich microdata on bank robberies to estimate individual-level disutilities of imprisonment. The identification rests on the money versus apprehension trade-off that robbers face inside the bank when deciding whether to leave or collect money for an additional minute. The distribution of...

An influential literature has used the aftermath of terrorist attacks to estimate large effects of police street deployment on crime. However, the elasticities obtained in these settings may not easily extrapolate to more standard circumstances. This paper exploits a natural experiment that...

Flexible work arrangements are on the rise in many countries, ranging from Germany's mini-jobs to UK's zero-hours contracts. These contracts allow for quick labor demand adjustments and are also seen as a way to discourage undeclared work, and more than 10 years ago Italy introduced what was...

Police accountability is essential to uphold the social contract. Monitoring the monitors is, however, not without difficulty. This paper reveals how police departments exploit specific laws surrounding death investigations to facilitate the underreporting of police killings. Our results show...

This article uses survey data of workers in Japan to study the effects of own and self-reported reference wages on subjective well-being. Higher wages lead to higher life and job satisfaction. When workers perceive that their peers earn higher wages, they report lower well-being. We compare our...

Despite its policy relevance there is little evidence on the joint evolution of gender differences in wages and workplace safety. Between 1994 and 2002 Italian micro-level data show a decline in both gaps, as well as an increased concentration of injuries among low-skilled female workers. The...

This article uses survey data of 90,000 union employees working in 62 publicly-traded companies in Japan between 1990 and 2004 to study the effect of both own and self-reported reference wages on workers' subjective well-being levels. The availability of self-reported reference wages generates...

The trade-off between the immediate returns from committing a crime and the future costs of punishment depends on an offender's time discounting. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sentence length generated by a large collective pardon in Italy and provide non-parametric evidence on the...

We analyze the consequences of illegally residing in a country on the likelihood of reporting a crime to the police and, as a consequence, on the likelihood to become victims of a crime. We use an immigration amnesty to address two issues when dealing with the legal status of immigrants: it is...

More policing reduces crime but little is known about the mechanism. Does policing deter crime by reducing its attractiveness, or because it leads to additional arrests of recurrent criminals? This paper provides evidence of a direct link between policing and arrests. During shift changes a...