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...

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...

Beyond direct damages, terrorism creates fear and insecurity, potentially reducing support for democratic institutions if these are deemed inadequate to tackle the threat, and increasing support for military governments. To investigate this possibility, we use data from Pakistan, a country that...

We study a broad class of dynamic consumer problems and characterize the short and long-run response of the demand for a good to a permanent increase in its market price. Such response can be non-monotonic over time, and the short and long-run price-elasticity of demand may have opposite sign....

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...

We provide first-pass evidence that the legalization of the cannabis market across US states may be inducing a crime drop. Exploiting the recent staggered legalization enacted by the adjacent states of Washington (end of 2012) and Oregon (end of 2014) we find, combining county-level...

We study the co-evolution of social participation and social capital accumulation, taking the view that the former contributes to the latter, and both contribute to the enjoyment of relational goods Within this framework, we show that a process of substitution of private for social activities...

We investigate the effects of civic norms and associational networks on crime rates. Through their impact on trust and economic development, civic norms may raise the expected returns to crime, but they may also increase its opportunity cost and the feelings of guilt and shame attached to it....

We investigate how the patterns of consumption and accumulation, as well as the patterns of time allocation and of social interaction, may be influenced by social pressure, i.e., by the choices of others. We display an evolutionary model involving several generations of interacting...

We introduce social capital accumulation into a neoclassical model, showing how it differs from physical and human capital accumulation. We take the view that social capital is crucial to the enjoyment of socially provided goods and that it is mainly accumulated by means of participation to...