Brian Goff, William Shughart, and Robert Tollison (1997) argue that the sharp increase in the number of hit batsmen after the adoption of the designated hitter rule is due to moral hazard. The author argues instead that simple changes in the composition of batters faced explains much of the...

Simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime. To break that simultaneity, this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument for changes in the prison population. The...

Previous empirical studies have found little evidence that voters reward incumbent members of Congress for bringing federal dollars to their district. One explanation for these findings is that incumbents who are in danger of losing reelection exert more effort to obtain federal funds. To...

Contestant voting behavior on the television game show Weakest Link provides an unusual opportunity to distinguish between taste-based and information-based theories of discrimination. In early rounds, strategic incentives encourage voting for the weakest competitors. In later rounds, the...

This paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence, incapacitation, and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime. Measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data. Incapacitation suggests that an increase in...

Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. This paper...

Differentiating empirically between deterrence and incapacitation is difficult since both are a function of expected punishment. In this article we demonstrate that the introduction of sentence enhancements provides a direct means of measuring deterrence. Because the criminal would have been...

Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been little previous research that attempts to quantitatively analyze the impact of officer race on tangible outcomes. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial...

This paper develops a methodology for consistently estimating the relative weights in senator utility functions, despite the fact that senator ideologies are unobserved. The empirical results suggest that voter preferences are assigned only one quarter of the weight in senator utility functions....