are contributions of time and money substitutes or complements abstractthis article empirically investigates the relationship between donations of time and money using canadian tax policy reforms that changed the tax price of charitable donations the 1988 reform where a charitable tax deduction was converted to a credit and the 2000 reform in provincial income taxes provide tax price variations plausibly exogenous to individuals unobserved heterogeneity our estimates on cross price effects imply that individuals make more time donations as the tax price of charitable donations increases and hence money and time donations are substitutes as some theories would imply this contrasts with earlier findings using cross sectional data

rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

waiting to give stated and revealed preferences we estimate and compare the effect of increased time costs on consumer satisfaction and behavior we are able to move beyond the existing literature which focuses on satisfaction and intention and estimate the effect of waiting time on return behavior further we do so in a prosocial context and our measure of cost is the length of time a blood donor spends waiting we find that relying on satisfaction data masks important time cost sensitivities namely it is not how the donor feels about the wait time that matters for return behavior but rather the actual duration of the wait consistent with theory we develop our results indicate that waiting has a significant longer term social cost we estimate that a 38 increase equivalent to one standard deviation in the average wait would result in a 10 decrease in donations per year this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

time and punishment an intertemporal model of crime if an increase in the rate at which a criminal commits crimes lowers the expected time until detection the income from crime net of expected fines must be discounted at a rate that varies with the crime rate this paper models the criminal s choice of the optimal crime rate under such conditions it is shown that irrespective of the criminal s attitude toward risk an increase in the probability of detection is more likely to deter crime than a comparable increase in penalties other implications of the model for the optimal enforcement of laws are also explored

charitable giving by married couples who decides and why does it matter we examine how charitable giving is influenced by who in the household is primarily responsible for giving decisions looking first at single person households we find men and women to have significantly different tastes for giving setting up a potential conflict for married couples we find that with respect to total giving married households tend to resolve these conflicts largely in favor of the husband s preferences bargaining over charitable giving rather than letting one spouse take charge reduces giving by about six percent when the woman is the decision maker she will still make a significantly different allocation of those charity dollars preferring to give to more charities but to give less to each our results give new insights into both the demographics of charitable giving and the costliness of household bargaining

income distribution police expenditures and crime a political economy perspective in this paper i present a structural approach to investigate empirically the relation between income distribution police expenditures and crime the approach is based on the estimation of an equilibrium model where heterogeneous individuals choose whether to engage in criminal activities and expenditures on police to apprehend criminals are determined endogenously through majority voting i discuss the identification and estimation of the parameters of the structural model using data for the united states jel d72 d78 k42

crime rates and local labor market opportunities in the united states 1979 1997 the labor market prospects of young unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s crime rates show a reverse pattern increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s because young unskilled men commit most crime this paper seeks to establish a causal relationship between the two trends previous work on the relationship between labor markets and crime focused mainly on the relationship between the unemployment rate and crime and found inconclusive results in contrast this paper examines the impact of both wages and unemployment on crime and uses instrumental variables to establish causality we conclude that both wages and unemployment are significantly related to crime but that wages played a larger role in the crime trends over the last few decades these results are robust to the inclusion of deterrence variables controls for simultaneity and controlling for individual and family characteristics

bank mergers and crime the real and social effects of credit market competition using a unique sample of commercial loans and mergers between large banks we provide micro level within county evidence linking credit conditions to economic development and find a spillover effect on crime neighborhoods that experience more bank mergers are subject to higher interest rates diminished local construction lower prices an influx of poorer households and higher property crime in subsequent years the elasticity of property crime with respect to merger induced banking concentration is 0 18 we show that these results are not likely due to reverse causation and confirm the central findings using state branching deregulation to instrument for bank competition we examine the real and social impact of local credit competition by documenting a link between the competitiveness of the local banking market credit conditions urban development and crime several recent studies peek and rosengren 2000 cetorelli and gambera 2001 klein peek and rosengren 2002 and burgess and pande 2003 tie credit market imperfections to diminished real economic activity and growth other studies connect the economic environment to property crime freeman 1999 levitt 2001 raphael and winter ebmer 2001 and nilsson 2004 it is reasonable to hypothesize therefore that reductions in bank competition may lead to economic decline and subsequently increases in property crime we empirically investigate the effects of bank consolidation and increased market power on credit availability and real activity using a unique sample of commercial loans and mergers between large banks in the 1990s we provide micro level evidence that garmaise is from the ucla anderson school and moskowitz is from the graduate school of business university of chicago and nber we have benefited from the suggestions and comments of tony bernardo marianne bertrand phillip bond doug diamond mark duggan eugene fama

education and crime over the life cycle we compare two large scale policy interventions aimed at reducing crime subsidizing high school completion and increasing the length of prison sentences to this purpose we use a life cycle model with endogenous education and crime choices we apply the model to property crime and calibrate it to u s data we find that targeting crime reductions through increases in high school graduation rates entails large efficiency and welfare gains these gains are absent if the same crime reduction is achieved by increasing the length of sentences we also find that general equilibrium effects explain roughly one half of the reduction in crime from subsidizing high school

a dynamic model of differential human capital and criminal activity this paper presents a dynamic model of criminal activity individuals are endowed with legal and criminal human capital potential incomes in legal and criminal sectors depend on the level of the relevant human capital the rate of return and random shocks human capital can be enhanced by participating in both sectors legal human capital can also be enhanced through investment human capital is subject to depreciation individuals maximize expected discounted lifetime utility which depends on consumption the model allows analyses of the effects of recessions imprisonment rehabilitation scenarios sanctions and returns to human capital new insights such as hysteresis in criminal behaviour are obtained

using electoral cycles in police hiring to estimate the effect of police on crime comment previous empirical studies have uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime possibly due to simultaneity problems this paper uses the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections as an instrumental variable to identify a causal effect of police on crime increases in the size of police forces are shown to be disproportionately concentrated in mayoral and gubernatorial election years increases in police are shown to substantially reduce violent crime but have a smaller impact on property crime the null hypothesis that the marginal social benefit of reduced crime equals the costs of hiring additional police cannot be rejected

what accounts for the decline in crime in this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the united states we propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime our main findings can be summarized as follows first the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996 second the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability the stronger economy and the aging of the population third the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible fourth the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime overall our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century

bargaining and distribution in marriage the standard economic model of the family is a common preference model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources in recent years this model has been challenged by game theoretic models of marriage that do not impose pooling and are therefore consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior in this paper the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage

the effects of race gender and survey methodologies on giving in the us this study examines the effects of race and gender on philanthropy and interaction effects between race or gender and survey methodologies results indicate differences in philanthropic behaviors by gender but not by race we also find significant interaction effects between survey methodologies and race and gender which may have important implications for social science research in which race and or gender explain or predict behaviors d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

optimal cartel pricing in the presence of an antitrust authority the dynamic behavior of a price fixing cartel is explored when it is concerned about creating suspicions that a cartel has formed consistent with preceding static theories the cartel s steady state price is decreasing in the damage multiple and the probability of detection however contrary to those theories it is independent of the level of fixed fines it is also shown that the cartel prices higher when a more competitive benchmark price is used in calculating damages

immigration regional conditions and crime evidence from an allocation policy in germany after the collapse of the soviet union more than 3 million people with german ancestors immigrated to germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic german immigrants by german authorities across regions upon arrival we find that immigration significantly increases crime the crime impact of immigration depends strongly on local labor market conditions with strong impacts in regions with high unemployment similarly we find substantially stronger effects in regions with high preexisting crime levels or large shares of foreigners

crime and victimization an economic perspective the recent upward trend in crime rates of developing countries has spurred widespread public concern about personal and proprietary insecurity in some countries the questions of crime violence and victimization are attracting more attention from academics and policy makers than traditional economic problems the objective of this paper is to examine the main issues related to crime and victimization from an economic perspective for this purpose the paper combines a review of the main results established in the literature with original research on the causes of crime and the risk factors of victimization the first section provides a review of the estimates of the costs of crime the main theoretical and empirical research on its causes and the relative advantages of official and survey data on crime the second section presents original work on the main causes of violent crime from a cross country perspective the empirical work starts with a basic model of the economic determinants of homicide and robbery rates in turn this empirical model is extended along five dimensions 1 deterrence factors 2 illegal drug related activities 3 demographic issues 4 income and ethnic polarization and 5 social capital the third section reviews recent case studies of latin american cities that rely on survey data to assess the empirical determinants of the probability of victimization these studies focus on three types of risk factors 1 individual characteristics 2 household characteristics and 3 community characteristics the main conclusions from the previous sections are summarized in section four

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

inequality and crime this paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties the behavior of property and violent crime are quite different inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime with an elasticity above 0 5 by contrast poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime but little on violent crime property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories

valuing the futures market clearinghouse s default exposure during the 1987 crash futures market clearinghouses are intermediaries that make large volume trading between anonymous parties feasible during the market crash in october 1987 rumors spread that a clearinghouse might fail this paper presents estimates of three measures of the default exposure the authors estimate the traditional summary statistic for risk exposure the tail probabilities they also estimate two economic measures the expected value of the payoffs in the tails and expected value of the payoffs in the tails conditional on landing in the tail the authors estimates indicate the market thought another crash was unlikely but that if one occurred it would be large

on the political economy of income redistribution and crime this article analyzes a general equilibrium model in which agents choose to specialize in either legitimate or criminal activities expenditures on police to apprehend criminals as well as income redistribution are determined endogenously through majority voting we investigate how crime redistribution and police expenditures depend on characteristics of the underlying distribution of income earning abilities and on the apprehension technology our model accounts for the positive correlation between inequality and crime the positive correlation between expenditures on police and redistribution and the lack of correlation between crime and redistribution observed in u s data

the deterrent effect of antitrust enforcement in this paper we formulate and test a model of collusive pricing in the presence of antitrust enforcement we show that a cartel s optimal price is likely to be neither the competitive price nor the price that the cartel would set in the absence of antitrust enforcement but rather an intermediate price that depends on the levels of antitrust enforcement efforts and penalties our empirical results reveal that increasing antitrust enforcement in the presence of a credible threat of large damage awards has the deterrent effect of reducing mark ups in the bread industry

incentive and incarceration effects in a general equilibrium model of crime an intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters the policy parameters are the length of the prison term the severity of punishment and the amount of police resources the number of crimes in society can be decomposed into an incentive part an incarceration part and a crime competition part the magnitudes of these three components are studied by means of empirical data from england and the us

a model of optimal fines for repeat offenders abstract this paper analyzes optimal fines in a model in which individuals can commit up to two offenses the fine for the second offense is allowed to differ from the fine for the first offense there are four natural cases in the model defined by assumptions about the gains to individuals from committing the offense in the case fully analyzed it may be optimal to punish repeat offenders more severely than first time offenders in another case it may be optimal to impose less severe penalties on repeat offenders and in the two remaining cases the optimal penalty does not change

public safety through private action an economic assessment of bids private actions to avoid and prevent criminal victimisation and assist public law enforcement are vital inputs into the crime control process one form of private action the business improvement district bid appears particularly promising a bid is a non profit organisation created by property owners to provide local public goods usually including public safety our analysis of 30 los angeles bids demonstrates that the social benefits of bid expenditures on security are a large multiple about 20 of the private expenditures crime displacement appears minimal crime reduction in the bid areas has been accompanied by a reduction in arrests suggesting further savings given the vital role of private individuals and firms in determining the effectiveness of the criminal justice system and the quality and availability of criminal opportunities private actions arguably deserve a more central role in the analysis of crime and crime prevention policy 1 but the leading scholarly commentaries on the crime drop during the 1990s have largely ignored the role of the private sector blumstein and wallman 2000 levitt 2004 zimring 2007 the potentially relevant trends include growing reporting rates the growing sophistication and use of alarms monitoring equipment and locks the considerable increase in the employment of private security guards and the decline in the use of cash cook and macdonald 2010 private actions can be encouraged or discouraged through regulation of the insurance industry reducing the costs of private co operation with police and courts gun control measures and other means the justification for such measures is the reasonable presumption that many sorts of private action to avoid mitigate and respond to crime generate substantial externalities business improvement districts bids are a particularly promising institution for harnessing private action to cost effective crime control a bid is a non profit organisation created by neighbourhood property owners to provide local public goods including public safety the organisation has the power to tax all the owners in the district including those who did not sign the original petition previous evaluations of bids in los angeles la indicate that they are successful in reducing crime rates brooks 2008 macdonald et al 2009 we provide a further analysis of the costs and benefits including the effect on arrests and spillovers and we estimate a dose response

the effect of prison population size on crime rates evidence from prison overcrowding litigation 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 resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies a one prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen index i crimes per year while calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner

workers warriors and criminals social conflict in general equilibrium we incorporate appropriation activities social conflict into canonical models of trade and study how economic shocks and policies affect the intensity of conflict we show that not all shocks that could make society richer reduce conflict positive shocks to labor intensive industries diminish conflict while positive shocks to capital intensive industries increase it the key requirement is that conflict activities be more labor intensive than the economy as this determines how shocks affect the returns and costs of conflict our theory is consistent with several observed patterns of conflict and implies that empirical work should take into account the relative factor intensities of the productive and conflict sectors in each country incorporating appropriation into a canonic general equilibrium model affects what policies may be deemed desirable in order to reduce conflict and generate pareto improvements policy must be distortionary while reforms that appear efficiency enhancing under the unrealistic assumption of perfect property rights may backfire this offers one explanation for why reforms based on traditional models without appropriation may be delayed and become unpopular when implemented and why societies may sympathize with seemingly inefficient redistribution

a model of criminal sanctions that incorporate both deterrence and incapacitation abstract this paper adapts the standard economic model of crime to incorporate both deterrence and incapacitation the results show that adding incapacitation can result in either a longer or a shorter optimal prison term compared to the deterrence only model

crime in europe and the united states dissecting the reversal of misfortunes contrary to common perceptions today both property and violent crimes with the exception of homicides are more widespread in europe than in the united states while the opposite was true thirty years ago we label this fact as the reversal of misfortunes we investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes incarceration abortion unemployment and immigration on crime for this we use time series data 1970 2008 from seven european countries and the united states we find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in europe our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether such a policy would also be efficient from a cost benefit point of view we leave this to future research paolo buonanno francesco drago roberto galbiati and giulio zanella

intra household experiments a survey experiments with family groups are rare but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate this paper provides a survey of the recent experimental work on intra household decision making i discuss some of the challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major areas that remain yet to be explored while general themes from the research are still emerging four results repeatedly occur 1 the absence of efficiency in intra household decisions 2 joint decisions that are not a convex combination of individual decisions 3 individual behaviour is affected by opportunities for hiding actions from spouses and 4 deviations from standard models of microeconomics in line with those seen in the anomalies literature of individual decision making

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

an economic analysis of the age crime profile abstract the age crime profile is one of the most established and prominent empirical regularities in social science this paper formulates an economic dynamic model of illegal behavior to explain the age crime profile the model offers a new interpretation of the age crime profile that is entirely different from the prevailing one in the literature the implications of the model are testable and are consistent with the empirical evidence examined in the paper the analysis shows that intertemporal criminal decisions can be modeled as a dynamic consumption investment problem

efficient intra household allocations a general characterization and empirical tests the neoclassical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members this paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households that have more than one member we make minimal assumptions about how the individual members of the household resolve conflicts all we assume is that however decisions are made outcomes are efficient we refer to this as the collective setting we show that in the collective setting household demands must satisfy a symmetry and rank condition on the slutsky matrix we also present some further results on the effects on demands of variables that do not modify preferences but that do affect how decisions are made we apply our theory to a series of surveys of household expenditures from canada the tests of the usual symmetry conditions are rejected for two person households but not for one person households we also show that income pooling is rejected for two person households we then test for our collective setting conditions on the couples data none of the collective setting restrictions are rejected we conclude that the collective setting is a plausible and tractable next step to take in the analysis of household behavior

charitable giving by married couples revisited abstract this paper investigates the effect of gender differences and household bargaining on charitable giving i replicate the study of andreoni brown and rischall 2003 using a different data set the recently available panel study of income dynamics psid supplement on charitable giving and test the sensitivity of their results to inclusion of additional control variables and the endogeneity of the tax price of giving first focusing on singles i find that males and females have significantly different tendencies toward giving to different areas of charitable activity next comparing households in which husband and wife make a joint decision on donations with those in which couples separately decide or assign a sole decisionmaker i show that bargaining over giving increases the amount of charitable contributions by almost 7 percent

four factors that explain both the rise and fall of us crime 1970 2003 previous research has failed to explain the rise and fall of us crime since 1970 this study uses cointegration error correction and common long memory components analyses to demonstrate that four basic crime factors explaining both the increases in us violent and property crime between 1970 and 1991 and the dramatic declines in crime after 1991 the four factors include arrest rates income per capita the proportion of criminal justice resources devoted to drug crime and alcohol consumption error correction models and common long memory factors show an especially close link between crime rates and the percentage of prison resources devoted to drug offenders similar factors result in cointegrated models for murder rape robbery assault and larceny additional modelling shows that effective abortion rates computed along the lines of donohue and levitt 2001 do not help in explaining the rise and fall of us crime

otc clearing arrangements for bank systemic risk regulation a simulation approach based on a simulation approach this paper compares different over the counter otc clearing models regarding their netting efficiency and loss concentration implications the results indicate that the mandatory clearing of all standardized otc derivatives by a central counterparty ccp propagated by regulators would significantly decrease systemic risk as compared to existing clearing arrangements only if the multilateral netting benefits of the ccp and loss mutualization are fully attained therefore regulators have to ensure that there is a critical mass of asset classes under mandatory clearing that broad market participation in the ccp is enabled and that there is an appropriate client asset protection regime

how to make the fine fit the corporate crime an analysis of static and dynamic optimal punishment theories abstract this paper investigates dynamic optimal punishment theory previous studies of optimal punishment theory have all been confined to a static setup the most celebrated result in the literature is becker s 1968 optimal punishment theory which states that the optimal fine should be a multiple of the social cost of the crime i show that this result is no longer valid in a dynamic environment the implications of the dynamic model of optimal punishment are found to be strikingly different from those of the static model

like godfather like son exploring the intergenerational nature of crime sons daughters with criminal fathers have 2 06 2 66 times higher odds of having a criminal conviction than those with noncriminal fathers one additional paternal sentence increases sons daug

the effect of employment frictions on crime this article provides estimates on how long it takes for released inmates to find a job and when they find a job how less likely they are to be incarcerated an on the job search model with crime is used to model criminal behavior derive the estimation method and analyze policies including a job placement program the results show that the unemployed are incarcerated twice as fast as the employed and take on average 6 months to find a job the article demonstrates that reducing the average unemployment spell of previously incarcerated criminals by 3 months reduces crime and recidivism by more than 5

a model of optimal incapacitation one of the functions of the criminal sanctions of imprisonment and the death sentence is to prevent individuals from doing harm by removing them from the population this incapacitative function of sanctions is considered below in a model in which the amount of harm individuals cause each period that they are free is not influenced by the threat of sanctions so as to abstract from the role of sanctions as a deterrent 2 the model is initially examined assuming that an individual s dangerousness i e the harm he will do if free remains the same each period of his life and that the sanction is imprisonment in this case it is optimal to imprison an individual if his dangerousness exceeds a threshold equal to the per period social cost of imprisonment moreover if it is optimal to imprison an individual at all it will be best to do so for life the optimal probability of apprehension is also determined the model is then extended in several ways it is first supposed that the dangerousness of individuals declines with age in this case it is again optimal to imprison individuals if their dangerousness exceeds the per period cost of imprisonment but it is optimal to release them if their dangerousness later falls below the threshold it is next supposed that the dangerousness of individuals declines with time spent in prison due to a rehabilitative effect in this case it is optimal to imprison individuals beginning at a lower threshold of dangerousness than the per period cost of imprisonment imprisonment is now socially more valuable and to release them if their dangerousness becomes sufficiently low finally it is supposed that a choice can be made between imprisonment and the death penalty and the optimal choice is discussed

clean or dirty energy evidence of corruption in the renewable energy sector this paper studies the link between public policy and corruption for the case of wind energy we show that publicly subsidized renewable energy can attract criminal appetites and favor the formation of criminal associations between entrepreneurs and politicians able to influence the licensing process the insights of a simple model of political influence by interest groups are tested empirically using italian data for the years 1990 2007 using a difference in difference approach we quantify the impact of a green certificate policy aimed at supporting renewables and find robust evidence that criminal association activity increased more in windy provinces after the introduction of the generous policy regime the magnitude of the effect is large the construction of an average wind park is associated with an increase in criminal activity of 6 in the treatment compared to the control group our findings show that in the presence of poor institutions even well designed market based policies can have an adverse impact the analysis is relevant for countries that are generally characterized by heavy bureaucracies weak institutions and by large renewable potential

optimal strategies for workers on temporary layoff in this paper we analyze the worker s behavior when faced with job offers which include possible temporary layoff spells of varying known durations we show that of the three strategies which can be optimal two involve search in all or part of the layoffs we also show that the duration of any particular spell plays no role in determining which strategy is optimal to pursue and finally we develop an index for evaluating jobs with different wage and layoff probabilities and show that the worker s reservation wage monotonically increases decreases or remains constant during the course of a layoff

do immigrants and their children free ride more than natives the main goal of this paper is to analyze the differences between immigrant and native households in their volunteer contributions and private transfer behavior as well as their receipt of assistance from nongovernment sources in addition we examine how the immigrant native differences evolve over time as immigrant households accumulate us experience finally we examine the voluntary contribution behavior of second generation immigrants and children in immigrant households to gain insight into the long term impact of immigration we do not find evidence that immigrant households free ride more than native born households first immigrant households when compared to similar native born households are less likely to receive assistance from nongovernment sources second immigrant status has no statistically significant impact on monetary contributions toward public good provision we also find that the immigrant native differences in monetary and time contributions tend to diminish over time as immigrants acquire us experience finally we find no significant differences between the second generation of immigrants and third or higher generations of americans in their voluntary contributions of money and time we obtain similar results for children in immigrant households they are not significantly different from children in native households in their time contribution and in their enrollment in federal meal programs the results are robust to various income and wealth controls do immigrants and their children free ride more than natives

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

still different after all these years solidarity behavior in east and west germany abstract using data from laboratory experiments we find that east germans show consistently less solidarity than west germans there has been no convergence in the 20 years after the reunification while it has recently been estimated that political values converge 20 to 40 years after the reunification alesina and fuchs schundeln 2007 we conclude from our findings that social behavior changes more slowly than political values we hypothesize that this is due to complementarities involved in individual social behavior and the necessity to coordinate on social norms on the society level

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

first day criminal recidivism abstract we report that on any given day the number of inmates released from incarceration significantly affects the number of offenses committed this day and we name this as first day recidivism our estimates of this novel approach to study early recidivism are robust to a variety of alternative model specifications we then show that first day recidivism can be eliminated by an increase in the gratuity provided to prisoners at the time of their release a simple cost benefit analysis shows that increasing the gratuity at release is a very efficient policy

does liberalizing cannabis laws increase cannabis use a key question in the ongoing policy debate over cannabis legal status is whether liberalizing cannabis laws leads to an increase in cannabis use this paper provides new evidence on the impact of a specific type of liberalization decriminalization on initiation into cannabis use our identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of cannabis policy reforms and our estimation framework marries a difference in difference approach with a discrete time duration model our results reveal evidence of both heterogeneity and dynamics in the response of cannabis uptake to decriminalization overall we find that the impact of decriminalization is concentrated amongst minors who have a higher rate of uptake in the first five years following its introduction

accomplice witnesses and organized crime theory and evidence from italy we develop an agency model of organized crime accounting for the main trade offs involved in the introduction of an accomplice witness program we characterize the optimal policy and identify its main determinants in a framework where public officials can be dishonest our predictions are tested by using data for italy before and after the introduction of the 1991 accomplice witness program as predicted by the model and the earlier antitrust literature the program appears to have strengthened deterrence and enhanced prosecution moreover consistent with a novel prediction of our theory the evidence suggests that the program efficacy is affected by the judicial system efficiency

social networks and private philanthropy abstract a theoretical model is provided in which an individual s social network enhances the consumption benefits from the public good we find conditions under which investments in network enhancing infrastructure would encourage individuals to donate time and money to charity an empirical investigation of the link between networks and private philanthropy is undertaken using the canadian national survey of giving volunteering and participating we find strong evidence that networks promote donations of time and money

the market for street crime an economic analysis of victim offender interaction abstract this paper views the economic explanation of crime rates from a new perspective by explicitly deriving an economic model of the behavior of potential victims and considering the interaction of the behavior of potential victims with the behavior of offenders crime is produced through offenders supplying time in search of victims and victims demanding to expose themselves to the environment a model is set up in which the crime rate the probability of being a victim per unit of exposure time and the probability of finding a victim per unit of offenders search time are simultaneously determined the model leads us to distinguish the real crime rate the probability of being a victim per unit of exposure time from the nominal crime rate the number of crimes per capita the nominal crime rate can be inversely related to the real crime rate

crime punishment and the market for offenses crime is a subject of intense emotions conflicting ideologies however economists have generally explained it as a reflection of individual choice and equilibrating market forces two major themes of the literature are outlined the evolution of a market model to explain the diversity of crime across time and space and the debate about the usefulness of positive versus negative incentives systematic analyses generally indicate that crime is affected on the margin by both positive and negative incentives there are serious limitations to the effectiveness of incapacitation and rehabilitation and optimal enforcement strategies involve trade offs between narrow efficiency and equity considerations

a general equilibrium model of crime and punishment abstract a model of crime and punishment is developed where individuals who differ in their earnings abilities choose between work and crime taking the probability and consequences of punishment into account an aggregate relationship between the probability of punishment and the level of crime is derived there is also a relationship between enforcement spending the number of criminals and the number punished in such an economy the possibility of multiple equilibria and the effects of changes in enforcement spending and in inequality on the levels of crime and punishment are discussed there is also discussion of social welfare and voting behavior

a general equilibrium model of crime commission and prevention abstract the model developed in this paper features a general equilibrium specification of the relationships among criminals victims of crime and a law enforcement agency these relationships are employed to endogenously derive an explicit intuitively appealing technology of crime commission and prevention the solution to the present model is therefore obtained with a set of more elementary assumptions than the previous literature where arbitrary curvature assumptions are invoked

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

dynamic deterrence theory economic theories of deterrence have primarily been built on static models a common and serious shortcoming of the existing dynamic deterrence models is the assumption of a twoperiod structure that ignores recidivism the aims of this paper are to formulate and solve a general dynamic deterrence model that incorporates recidivistic behaviour to explore its implications and to derive some testable predictions the analysis shows how the value and the intensity of engaging in illegal activity change over time highlights the weaknesses of twoperiod deterrence models and compares the deterrent effectiveness of increasing the likelihood of punishment versus the severity of punishment finally the recidivistic model provides a structural foundation for the widely used stochastic process models of crime in operations research and criminology

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

women s income and boy girl anthropometric status in the cote d ivoire abstract this paper examines the effects of the intrahousehold distribution of income on children s anthropometric status in the c te d ivoire we find that increases in the proportion of cash income accruing to women increases boys height for age relative to girls and that this effect is statistically significant we suggest that this result may reflect efficiency and equity concerns which in this case reinforce each other

can the financial markets privately regulate risk the development of derivatives clearinghouses and recent over the counter innovations this paper explores how organization and contract design has evolved to address regulatory challenges in risk management in the early part of the century futures exchanges responded to credit risks by developing clearinghouses that act as guarantors the liability structure of the clearinghouse involves mutualization of risks through partial permanent integration of the exchange members bank clearinghouses historically involved contingent integration and risk mutualization during panics recent organizational innovations have allowed the risk control benefits of the clearinghouse to be replicated in the decentralized over the counter derivatives markets credit rating agencies and advances in risk modeling are key to permitting the recent dis integration which has implications for the scope of public versus private regulation in banking and financial markets