This paper investigates the relationship between mafia and politics by focusing on the market for votes. It exploits the fact that in the early 1990s the Italian party system collapsed, new parties emerged and mafia families had to look for new political allies. It presents evidence, based on...

Social sanctions may be a strong deterrent of crime. This paper presents a formal model that relates crime and social sanction to social interaction density. We empirically test the theoretical predictions using a provincial level panel dataset on dierent crimes in Italy between 1996 and 2003....

We investigate the effects of civic norms and associational networks on crime rates. Civic norms may attach guilt and shame to criminal behaviour, thus increasing its opportunity cost. Associational networks may increase returns to non-criminal activities and raise detection probabilities, but...

This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. It measures the degree of social openness of a community by the diversity of its surname distribution, which reflects the history of migration and inbreeding. It...

This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. It measures the degree of social openness of a community by the diversity of its surname distribution, which reflects the history of migration and inbreeding. It...

An argument against the legalization of the cannabis market is that such a policy would increase crime. Exploiting the recent staggered legalization enacted by the states of Washington (end of 2012) and Oregon (end of 2014) we show, combining difference-in-differences and spatial regression...