This paper estimates the intent-to-treat (ITT) effect of Germany’s 2000 introduction of conditional birthright citizenship on juvenile crime in the federal states of Baden-Württemberg and Hesse. We utilize administrative police data on suspects involved in multiple incidents and/or serious offenses and, employing a difference-in-differences approach, find that the policy (i) decreased the number of incidents for suspects born between the first six months after the enactment of the reform by approximately 9%, (ii) led to a larger (-11% vs. -7%) and more significant decrease of incidents in regions with high vs. low treatment intensity, (iii) is associated with a crime decrease for boys (-11%), but with an increase for girls (+9%), and (iv) has reduced the number of incidents (intensive margin) linked to suspects, but not the number of suspects involved in multiple incidents and/or serious offenses (extensive margin).

This paper studies firms violating labor regulations and the impact of enforcement on firms and workers. A model of monopsonistic firms that set both wages and working conditions shows that labor market power can lead to poor working conditions, and enforcement of minimum conditions can raise employment through higher labor supply. We link inspection records to survey and administrative employer-employee data for large Mexican manufacturing firms to test the model predictions. Violating firms invest less in worker training, have lower productivity, employ fewer women, and hold greater labor market share. We show that stratified random inspections tend to increase regulatory compliance and causally estimate these inspections raise total firm employment by 4–7% within one year. Firm wages decrease by less than 2%, driven by compositional changes rather than wage setting. Altogether, enforcing labor regulation compliance among large manufacturing firms can improve working conditions, mitigate labor market power, and increase employment.

We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period.

Should criminal fines be income-dependent? We explore this question in the context of the Finnish speeding fine system, which exhibits income-dependence. Building on the optimal commodity tax literature, we construct a model of optimal fine determination in which the planner uses fines and income taxes to mitigate speeding externalities and redistribute resources across individuals. At the optimum, fines will be income dependent if either (1) the marginal social cost of speeding is correlated with the income of the offender (the efficiency motive) or (2) preferences for crime are correlated with income (the redistributive motive); fine elasticities govern the relative importance of these two forces. To estimate these forces empirically, we draw on linked income tax returns, accident reports, and crime report data from Finland. However, statutory motivations for income-dependent fines typically cite “equality-before-the-law,” rather than redistributive or efficiency-based rationales; we therefore plan to measure fairness preferences using a survey.