Homicides and the age of criminal responsibility: a density discontinuity approach

We employ a density discontinuity design to evaluate the deterrence effect of more severe punishments around the legal age of criminal responsibility in Brazil. Motivated by the criminology literature, we propose a novel proxy based on the inherent risk underlying criminal activities. Using violent death rates as a proxy for an individual’s involvement in violent crime, we find no discernible deterrence effects. We additionally study arrest data from the country’s third most populous state, Rio de Janeiro, and discuss the advantages of our proxy in light of potential underreporting biases from using criminal records

Information Quality and Regime Change: Evidence from the Lab

We experimentally test the effects of information quality in a global game of regime change. The game features a payoff structure such that more dispersed private information induces agents to attack more often and reduces regime stability in the Bayesian Nash Equilibrium. We show that subjects in the lab do not play as predicted by equilibrium theory. Instead, more dispersed information makes subjects more cautious, increasing regime stability. We show that this finding is consistent with a modified global game model in which agents engage in level- thinking. In the level- model, information quality affects agents’ actions through a novel channel, that enables a strategic attenuation effect. As information quality worsens, strategic complementarities between different level- types weaken, generating a force that is capable of reversing the comparative statics from the equilibrium model