Suchergebnisse

We study a theoretical general equilibrium environment in which the only activity of interest is armed robbery. Agents choose whether to be citizens or robbers, and whether to purchase handguns. Armed citizens can protect themselves from robbery but any armed agent runs the risk of accidentally shooting himself or another agent. The government chooses a gun tax, and the intensity of police efforts to arrest would-be robbers and citizens who arm for self-defense. Properties of an equilibrium are characterized and the model is calibrated and solved. In all cases unique equilibria are obtained. We find that guns are an inefficient way of redistributing wealth, in the sense that social costs are very large relative to actual wealth redistribution. In this model society would be vastly better off if handguns could be eliminated. We do find, however, that handguns substantially deter crime when crime is defined as taking another?s wealth by force. Yet handguns cause accidental deaths and resultantly in this model policymakers confront a fundamental trade-off between property rights and gun deaths.

We formulate a simple theoretical model of a banking industry that we use to identify and construct theory-based measures of systemic bank shocks (SBS). These measures differ from 'banking crisis' (BC) indicators employed in many empirical studies, which are constructed using primarily information on government actions undertaken in response to bank distress. Using both country-level and firm-level samples, we show that SBS indicators consistently predict BC indicators, indicating that BC indicators actually measure lagged policy responses to systemic bank shocks. We then re-examine the impact of macroeconomic factors, bank market structure, deposit insurance, and external shocks on the probability of systemic bank shocks (SBS) and on 'banking crisis' (BC) indicators. We find that the impact of these variables on the likelihood of a policy response to banking distress (as represented by BC indicators) is frequently quite different from that on the likelihood of a systemic bank shock (SBS). We argue that disentangling the effects of systemic bank shocks and policy responses is crucial in understanding the roots of banking crises. We believe that many findings of a large empirical literature need to be re-assessed.