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on Law and Economics |
| By: | Ozkan Eren; Randi Hjalmarsson; Orgul Ozturk |
| Abstract: | We exploit conditionally random assignment of case files to judges in a Southern U.S. state to study the effects of same-gender judge assignment on juvenile justice decisions and long-run socioeconomic outcomes. Using a generalized differences-in-differences design, we find evidence of same-gender gaps in sentencing decisions: relative to males, female judges are 18% less likely to incarcerate female than male defendants. A novel rank-order test confirms these findings and indicates that the results are not driven by a small subset of judges. Own-gender judicial assignment, especially for Black children, has lasting effects on socioeconomic outcomes beyond the courtroom: educational attainment increases while adult criminal involvement and welfare use decrease. Further analyses suggest that these long-run improvements are not just driven by differential incarceration decisions. |
| Keywords: | Gender Disparities, Discrimination, Incarceration, Juvenile, Court, Long-Run Consequences, Education |
| JEL: | K40 J16 I20 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26035 |
| By: | Alessandra Foresta; Rigissa Megalokonomou; Michael Vlassopoulos |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether crisis narratives affect how the judiciary handles tax evasion. We study this question in the context of the Greek debt crisis, in which tax evasion was publicly blamed for the fiscal collapse, and judges themselves experienced substantial salary cuts as part of the resulting austerity programme. Using a novel dataset compiled from Greek Supreme Court rulings between 2006 and 2014, we compare tax evasion appeals with appeals in other serious crimes not directly related to the fiscal crisis, such as homicide and rape, in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that the probability that the Supreme Court rejects tax-evasion appeals increases by about 25 percentage points relative to these control offences after January 2010-about a 43% increase relative to the pre-crisis baseline. Effects are larger in months with greater public attention to tax evasion, as measured by Google Trends, suggesting a role for salience. Our findings suggest that crisis narratives, particularly when coupled with personal economic shocks to judges, can influence the judicial treatment of tax offences. |
| Keywords: | economic narratives, judicial decision-making, tax evasion, financial crisis, legal institutions, difference-in-differences |
| JEL: | D91 P16 K40 K42 H26 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26088 |
| By: | Massimo Anelli; Paolo Pinotti; Zachary Porreca |
| Abstract: | We document the transplantation of the Sicilian Mafia to the United States in the 1920s, when a large-scale repression campaign in Italy targeted Mafia strongholds and forced many Mafiosi to migrate, and study the resulting short- and long-term effects across neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Using newly linked administrative and historical data from the U.S. Census, Social Security records, and declassified files of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, we show that neighborhoods hosting enclaves of migrants from Sicilian Mafia strongholds targeted by the repression later became centers of Italo-American Mafia activity. These neighborhoods experienced higher violence, incarceration, and financial exclusion in the short run, but higher income, employment, and educational attainment in the long run. The results suggest that while the arrival of organized criminal networks initially intensified conflict and exclusion, their subsequent consolidation generated localized economic benefits, helping to explain the long-term resilience and persistence of organized crime. |
| Keywords: | organized crime, migration, historical persistence, neighborhood effects |
| JEL: | K42 F22 N32 R23 D02 |
| Date: | 2025–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25165 |
| By: | Paolo Pinotti; Gianmarco Daniele; Marco De Simoni; Domenico Marchetti; Giovanna Marcolongo |
| Abstract: | We show that credit constraints significantly increase the risk that firms are infiltrated by organized crime, defined as the covert involvement of criminal organizations in corporate decision-making. Using confidential data on criminal investigations, credit ratings, and loan histories for the universe of Italian firms, we find that a downgrade to substandard credit status reduces credit availability by 30% over five years and increases the probability of infiltration by 5%, relative to comparable firms. A local randomization design comparing firms just above and below the downgrade threshold confirms this result. The effect is pervasive across sectors and regions, but particularly strong in real estate, where the probability of infiltration rises by 10% following a downgrade. Infiltrated firms also display higher survival rates than other downgraded firms, despite similar declines in employment and revenues. These findings suggest that organized crime can serve as a financial backstop -- sustaining non-viable businesses and potentially redirecting their strategies to serve criminal interests. |
| Keywords: | Organized crime, Firms, Bank Credit |
| JEL: | G32 K42 L25 O17 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25101 |
| By: | Randi Hjalmarsson; Matthew J. Lindquist |
| Abstract: | Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is highly prevalent amongst criminal justice populations: ADHD diagnoses and medication are upwards of five times more likely for individuals who have a Swedish prison record than those without. We merge Swedish prison registers (with detailed healthcare data) to out-of-prison healthcare, crime, and employment data to study the effect of in-prison ADHD diagnoses. For individuals with no ADHD history, this new diagnosis treatment can include an information shock, medication and/or therapy. We compare the pre- and post-prison dynamics for treated inmates to alternative undiagnosed comparison groups: all untreated individuals, untreated early spells for repeat offenders treated in later spells, or a matched and reweighted control group. A robust set of findings emerge. New in-prison ADHD diagnoses significantly and persistently increase post-prison ADHD and substance abuse related healthcare. Crime and labor market outcomes, however, do not improve. There are also significant family spill-over effects: both children and siblings with no previous history of ADHD are more likely to be treated for ADHD after a newly diagnosed family member's prison spell. Though prison appears to serve as an institution to bring high-risk, vulnerable populations into the public healthcare system, our results suggest that ADHD related care may not be as effective at lowering crime as many policy makers argue. |
| Keywords: | Prison, Health, ADHD, Medication, Crime, Recidivism |
| JEL: | K42 I14 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26030 |
| By: | Arnab K. Basu; Tsenguunjav Byambasuren; Nancy H. Chau |
| Abstract: | We trace the impact of a partial liquor ban - from launch to reversal - on alcohol consumption and women's experience with intimate partner violence (IPV) in Kerala, India. Decomposing the policy-induced and reversal effects by employing difference-in-differences and event-study approaches, we identify a significant reduction in alcohol consumption (but only in liquor-serving bars) with an accompanying reduction in IPV during the policy period. However, both alcohol consumption and IPV rebounded to pre-ban levels after the policy removal. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals these effects to be confined only amongst high-wealth households. A battery of robustness tests confirms our findings. |
| Keywords: | Alcohol drinking, Domestic violence, Prohibition, Kerala, India |
| JEL: | D04 D12 J16 K42 |
| Date: | 2025–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25162 |
| By: | Jerg Gutmann; Pascal Langer; Matthias Neuenkirch |
| Abstract: | Judging governments' responses to international sanctions based on their compliance with a universal human rights standard can be criticized as an imposition of Western values. We propose an alternative benchmark for government action that is not subject to the same potential criticism: whether governments comply with their own national constitutions as codified forms of the social contract. Our analysis of 182 countries from 1962 to 2022 using state-of-the-art panel DiD and event study estimators corroborates our theoretical expectation that government responses depend on regime type. Whereas democracies improve their constitutional compliance under sanction pressure, autocracies start complying even less. These results suggest that sanctions can only make governments comply with their legal commitments if those governments are dependent on broad popular support. |
| Keywords: | Constitutional compliance, democracy, human rights, international sanctions |
| JEL: | F51 K38 K42 P48 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:trr:wpaper:202605 |
| By: | Steeve Mongrain and Matteo Pazzona (Simon Fraser University) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how the private sector responds to reductions in the public provision of a key public good: internal security. It develops an infinitehorizon theoretical model in which police forces and potential victims jointly determine optimal levels of security investment. These theoretical predictions are examined using a novel panel dataset on private security licenses and police staffing across England and Wales from 2009 to 2019, exploiting variation generated by UK austerity policies that produced heterogeneous reductions in police numbers. To address endogeneity in public policing, two-stage least squares estimation is employed, using national police grants and local council tax precepts as instrumental variables. The results reveal substantial crowdingout: each police officer reduction per capita increases private security licenses by 0.52, with each £1 saved on police officers corresponding to approximately £0.41 spent on private security. This response is concentrated in functions closely aligned with policing. The analysis also uncovers important heterogeneity, with public policing becoming complementary to private security in wealthier and more unequal areas. Finally, the findings show that public police reduce all types of crime, whereas private security affects only property crime, underscoring the differential welfare implications of security privatization. |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp26-08 |
| By: | Canini, Renata; González, Felipe; Prem, Mounu |
| Abstract: | We study how violent encounters between police and civilians shape citizens' trust in the state. We combine nearly 750, 000 survey responses from seventeen Latin American countries with a new dataset of high-profile police-civilian fatalities. Exploiting the timing of these events relative to survey interviews, we provide causal evidence on their effects. Civilian deaths caused by police reduce trust in state institutions, while police-officer deaths caused by civilians increase it, with no effects on interpersonal trust. These effects arise only when events are covered by the media, indicating that information diffusion - rather than violence per se - drives changes in trust. |
| Keywords: | state, police, trust, Latin America |
| JEL: | D72 D83 K42 O17 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1745 |
| By: | Benjamin W. Arold; Elliott Ash; W. Bentley MacLeod; Suresh Naidu |
| Abstract: | Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) specify the contractual rights of unionized workers, but their full legal content has not yet been analyzed by economists. This paper develops novel natural language methods to analyze the empirical determinants and economic value of these rights using a new collection of 30, 000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015. We parse legally binding rights (e.g., "workers shall receive...") and obligations (e.g., "the employer shall provide. ..") from contract text, and validate our measures through evaluation of clause pairs and comparison to firm surveys on HR practices. Using time varying province-level variation in labor income tax rates, we find that higher taxes increase the share of worker-rights clauses while reducing pre-tax wages in unionized firms, consistent with a substitution effect away from taxed wages toward untaxed rights. Further, an exogenous increase in the value of outside options (from a leave-one-out instrument for labor demand) increases the share of worker rights clauses in CBAs. Combining the regression estimates, we infer that a one-standard-deviation increase in worker rights is valued at about 5.7% of wages. |
| Keywords: | Collective bargaining, Text as data, Labor laws, Incomplete contracts, Workplace amenities |
| JEL: | J32 J52 K31 H24 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25113 |
| By: | Sulin Sardoschau; Annalí Casanueva-Artís |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impact of right-wing populist mobilization on anti-minority violence across 10, 000 German municipalities between 2015 and 2019. Exploiting variation in weather conditions on scheduled protest days, we show that right-wing protests held on pleasant days increase their salience and visibility by attracting larger crowds, generating more attention in traditional and social media and subsequently raising the probability of hate crimes by 8.6 percentage points. These offenses are carried out predominantly by known, recidivist, lone-actor extremists in the aftermath of the protest. Spillovers are substantial: downstream newspaper coverage of protests and social media networks transmit violence to municipalities that did not host any protest. Our findings highlight a critical externality of grass-roots populist movements: they not only drive immediate local violence but also propagate it across wider networks. |
| Keywords: | Populism, hate crimes, protest, media |
| JEL: | D74 D72 K42 J15 L82 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26073 |
| By: | Kucera, Alexander (Michigan State University); Scavette, Adam (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia); Porreca, Zachary (Magna Graecia University) |
| Abstract: | The geography of the U.S. opioid epidemic has shifted across successive waves. After a period in which overdose mortality increasingly burdened rural and suburban communities, the fentanyl era appears to have redirected harm toward dense urban cores. We document this post-2015 urbanization using national mortality microdata from CDC WONDER and inpatient discharge records from Pennsylvania. We show three patterns. First, urban overdose mortality rises sharply after fentanyl becomes the dominant illicit opioid. Second, within large metropolitan areas, overdose rates diverge between core counties and suburban peripheries, with especially large gaps in eastern metros, where fentanyl diffused earlier and more intensely. Third, within the Philadelphia region, overdose-related inpatient admissions become increasingly concentrated in a small number of central-city ZIP codes, especially near longstanding drug-market hotspots. We argue that this shift reflects both supply- and demand-side changes associated with fentanyl. If overdose risk is becoming more spatially concentrated, then naloxone distribution, outreach, enforcement, and emergency response may be more effective when targeted to a narrower set of urban locations. |
| Keywords: | fentanyl, overdose, opioid, drug epidemic |
| JEL: | I18 K42 I10 R11 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18562 |
| By: | Horta-Saenz, Daniela (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration); Tami-Patiño, Anderson (Dept. of Economics, KIMEP University) |
| Abstract: | Do coercive efforts to dismantle illicit economic activity promote development, or can they inadvertently undermine it? We study this question in the context of Colombia’s large-scale aerial eradication of coca crops using glyphosate. We digitize detailed geographic data on sprayed areas and exploit quasi-random variation in exposure to eradication flights to estimate effects on human capital and socioeconomic outcomes. In the short term, aerial eradication increases school dropout, primarily through negative income shocks to affected households. Over time, exposed villages exhibit lower educational attainment, higher child labor, earlier marriage, and poorer living conditions even after spraying ceased. |
| Keywords: | Drug Control Policies; Human Capital; Rural Development |
| JEL: | I25 K42 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–04–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2026_005 |
| By: | de Araujo, Felipe Telles Veloso |
| Abstract: | This paper argues that blockchain has not eliminated the traditional problem of asset concealment, but has profoundly changed its form. Unlike cash, transactions on public blockchains leave durable, auditable, and chronologically ordered traces. That does not amount to absolute transparency. It means, rather, that the investigation of illicit financial flows now depends on a double movement: technical reading of the on-chain trail and production of off-chain evidence capable of attributing that trail to concrete persons, companies, or criminal organizations. The paper explains why pseudonymity is not anonymity, examines the main forensic heuristics used in blockchain analysis and their evidentiary limits, and shows how mixers, privacy-enhancing technologies, cross-chain bridges, and DeFi increase investigative complexity without making attribution impossible. It then discusses major international cases, recent Brazilian regulation and case law, and the institutional importance of cooperation among courts, regulators, exchanges, and investigators. The central claim is that blockchain’s principal contribution to the repression of illicit financial flows is not total transparency, but a change in the evidentiary regime: the challenge is less to locate value in the abstract than to reconstruct trajectories, test control hypotheses, and transform technical traces into valid proof and effective asset recovery. |
| Date: | 2026–04–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:k5n7a_v1 |
| By: | Simeon Djankov; Edward L. Glaeser; Andrei Shleifer |
| Abstract: | What determines whether and how regulations are reformed? We use a newly constructed data set of 3, 590 successful and failed regulatory reforms in 189 countries, between 2005 and 2022, to address this question. We document that regulations have become more business friendly in some regulatory domains but not others. We also show that regulations are more business friendly in richer than in poorer countries, and that holding initial regulatory levels constant, richer countries also reform more. We present a model in which the successful passage of reforms is shaped by the number of veto points in the approval process, the social returns to reform, and the cost of compensating losers from reform, and then test it using our new data set. We find that richer countries have both higher reform attempt and success rates, but less impact of individual reforms on regulation than poorer countries. These findings are consistent with the model if richer countries are better at reform, perhaps because they can compensate losers more efficiently. Across the world, reform attempt rates are strongly correlated with reform success rates but not with reform impact levels. Within countries, a higher share of technological reform attempts is successful, compared to administrative or legal reforms, consistent with the importance of veto points. |
| JEL: | H10 H11 K20 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35119 |