MacCoun and Reuter's primary goal is to understand how current U.S. drug policies can be improved. They carefully describe the facts and trends regarding drug usage, criminal justice enforcement, and the harms associated with drug use, then discuss the public debate surrounding drug prohibition and give an informal treatment of the theory underlying the competing positions. The authors study policies towards other vices like gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, and prostitution, as well as drug policies in other times and places. The broader implication that emerges is that there is a desperate need for better data and increased research if there is any hope for making truly informed policy on illicit drugs.

Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This article reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are more likely to make a change, more satisfied with their decisions, and happier six months later than those whose coin toss instructed maintaining the status quo. This finding suggests that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.

Over the past thirty years, the use of child safety seats in motor vehicles has increased dramatically. There is, however, relatively little empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of child safety seats relative to the much cheaper alternative of traditional seat belts. Using data on all fatal crashes in the United States from 1975 to 2003, I find that child safety seats, in actual practice, do not provide any discernible improvement over adult lap and shoulder belts in reducing fatalities among children aged two to six. Lap-only belts are somewhat less effective, but still far superior to riding unrestrained.

For more than a decade, an MIT-trained economist has meticulously recorded the results of nearly 75,000 deliveries of bagels and donuts to corporate offices. These bagels and donuts are left in workplaces in the morning, along with a list of prices and a lockbox. Office workers purchase the products on the honor system. Later that day, the uneaten goods and the lock box are collected and the relevant data for each office are recorded in a spreadsheet. These data provide a unique opportunity for understanding the extent to which individuals behave honestly in this setting and the factors that influence the level of honesty. An analysis of the discrepancy between the prices of the goods consumed and the actual payments deposited in the lock box yields a number of insights. First, the base payment rate is quite high. On average, payments represent almost 90 percent of the posted price. In a model of pure self-interest, one would expect very low payment rates, because there would seem to be many opportunities for individuals to take the products with almost no chance of their nonpayment being detected. Moderating the tendency to take the products without paying is the fact that low payment rates will increase the probability the delivery company stops serving the company. Paying for one’s bagels and donuts, viewed in this light, is a public good for other office workers. Thus, one might expect a strong negative relationship between office size and payment rates, which is not present in the data. Rather, the data appear more consistent with a model in which there are internal, nonpecuniary costs associated with stealing the bagels and donuts, i.e., people overwhelmingly pay for the products because it would be wrong not to do so. The observed payment rates are systematically related to a variety of observable factors. For instance, payment rates fall in response to increases in the posted price. This is consistent with the increase in financial costs pushing some marginal consumers to be willing to sustain the moral cost associated with not stealing the goods or paying less than full price. Payment rates are higher when many of the bagels and donuts go uneaten, suggesting that the marginal consumer pays a lower share of the posted price than the inframarginal consumer. Purchasers of donuts appear to be more likely to pay less than the full price. There is a sharp and persistent increase in the payment rate following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply by Steven D. Levitt. Published in volume 92, issue 4, pages 1244-1250 of American Economic Review, September 2002

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.

This paper develops a methodology for consistently estimating the relative weights in senator utility functions, despite the fact that senator ideologies are unobserved. The empirical results suggest that voter preferences are assigned only one quarter of the weight in senator utility functions. The national 'party line' also has some influence but the senator's own ideology is the primary determinant of roll-call voting patterns. These results cast doubt on the empirical relevance of the median voter theorem. Estimation of the model requires only roll-call voting data, making it widely applicable. Copyright 1996 by American Economic Association.