Research Papers

We investigated the impact of “shall-issue” right-to-carry laws, which guarantee concealed carry permits to qualified applicants, on violent and property crime rates.

Our findings can inform policy decisions on gun control and potential consequences of changes to gun laws.

We contribute to ongoing debates about gun violence and provide nuanced evidence on the complex relationship between gun laws and crime rates.

We investigated the mixed empirical evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment and potential explanations for these inconsistencies.

Our findings can contribute to the ongoing debate about capital punishment and inform policy decisions regarding its use as a criminal deterrent.

We shed light on the complexities of measuring deterrence and highlight the need for careful consideration of various factors before drawing conclusions about capital punishment’s effectiveness.

This paper examines how estimates of the deterrent effect of capital punishment depend on alternate choices of assumptions concerning the homicide process. We demonstrate how various assumptions have driven the conflicting findings from studies on capital punishment, and isolate a particular set of assumptions that are required to find a positive deterrent effect.

Results on the deterrent effect of capital punishment are disparate. This article is designed to understand the sources of the disparate literature findings. Specifically, we consider how different substantive assumptions about the homicide process affect deterrence effect estimates.

The effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring homicides has remained unclear despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s moratorium on capital punishment and the subsequent adoption of capital punishment by a subset of states, combined with very different rates of execution across polities, would appear to be an ideal environment for revealing deterrence effects using panel data methods.

We investigated the observational implications of taste-based discrimination in racial profiling, considering how biases in law enforcement decisions may manifest in observed data.

We aimed to provide insights into the challenges of identifying and addressing taste-based discrimination in racial profiling through statistical and econometric analysis.

We contribute to the understanding of the complexities involved in studying and combating racial profiling, emphasizing the importance of careful empirical analysis.

This paper provides a general description of the relationship between individual decision problems and aggregate crime regressions to elucidate the behavioral and statistical assumptions that are implicit in the use of aggregate crime regressions.

We wish to understand how aggregate crime regressions may be appropriately used to inform positive and normative questions. We hope our discussion will prove useful in highlighting some of the limitations of the use of these regressions and, in particular, indicate how empirical findings may be overinterpreted when careful attention is not given to the link between the aggregate data and individual behavior.

Despite recent efforts to employ microeconomic data and natural experiments, aggregate crime regressions continue to play a significant role in criminological analyses.

We provided a general description of the relationship between individual decision problems and aggregate crime regressions. The analysis is designed to elucidate the behavioral and statistical assumptions implicit in the use of aggregate crime regressions for both the analysis of crime determinants and counterfactual policy evaluation.

We wanted to examine the construction and interpretation of aggregate crime regressions to highlight some limitations of using these regressions and, in particular, indicate how empirical findings may be overinterpreted when careful attention is not given to the link between the aggregate data and individual behavior.

Despite recent efforts to employ microeconomic data and natural experiments, aggregate crime regressions continue to play a significant role in criminological analyses.