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When does ordinary, legal interpersonal attention behaviour become aberrant, illegal stalking behaviour? How do we stop it when it does? As a society, we have only recently recognized stalking (episodic, continued unwanted contact of one person by another) as criminal behaviour—that it ranges well beyond the merely bothersome and creates real hardships for victims, famous or not. In the United States, formally codified anti-stalking law first appeared in the 1990s, and it continues to evolve. In part because of the relative newness of the law, scholarly analysis of stalking remains rare and confined primarily to clinical studies by psychologists and psychiatrists. But a pursuer's interpersonal attention, a target's reciprocation, and the evolution of these behaviours into patterns of stalking reflect systematic economic choices made by those agents. The economic model of stalking developed in this paper analyses the causes and consequences of these choices by considering interpersonal pursuit and reciprocation as a sequential game. The analysis allows us to understand stalking within the broader context of economic behaviours characterized by episodic interpersonal encounters, legal and otherwise, and facilitates economic explanations for several stylized patterns commonly observed in real stalking cases. Some of these carry relevance for policy and may serve as a foundation for future empirical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burglary has declined markedly in the U.S.A. We investigate whether increased imports from China (the China Trade Shock), by reducing the market value of theft-worthy goods, reduced the incentive to commit this and other property crimes. Panel data models reveal lower property crime rates in association with increased Chinese imports and comparable effects in relation to other prominent trade partners, indicating minimal property crime displacement effects. Some import effects do link to increased violent crime rates, but none in relation to imports from China. The results illustrate how expanded trade provides social benefits in addition to its well-established economic benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how employers strategically use immigrant and native workers, within the empirical setting of the U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa (DIV) program and the National Football League (NFL). Strategic organizations determine their own optimal immigrant‐native mix and consider similar actions and reactions by rival employers, a noncooperative game. DIVs exogenously increased the labor market presence of immigrants. I exploit this fact to examine how NFL clubs subsequently altered their employment of immigrant players. Panel‐based empirical analysis illustrates the hypothesized prevalence of matching in immigrant use among rival clubs, sensitivity of that equilibrium to immigration era, and heterogeneous occupational and organizational consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Strategic human capital scholars suggest that firms' human capital rents are greater when labor market frictions are more prevalent. Taking this argument further, we suggest that when frictions for one type of human capital decrease, firms are motivated to place greater emphasis on human capital that is interdependent in production where frictions are unchanged. Empirically, we exploit an exogenous institutional change in the National Football League to demonstrate that coaching (managerial) dismissal and replacement is more likely to occur (and is influenced by a wider variety of information) after frictions for player (production worker) human capital decrease. Our findings suggest adding a new dimension—tradeoffs between related labor market segments—to the scholarly conversation about how firms manage their human capital (and other resources) strategically. Managerial Summary: We often point to the existence of labor market frictions for different types of human capital as reasons why firms would emphasize one type of human capital over another. But changes in frictions in markets for related human capital, the present focus, can influence this decision as well. In particular, our study demonstrates that when the NFL implemented free agency and a salary cap in the market for player talent in 1993, limiting the ability of teams to stockpile talented players, NFL teams responded by increasing their emphasis on coaching talent in the production of wins. This increased emphasis manifested in more frequent coaching dismissals and a greater influence of different types of information on the desirability of replacing a team's head coach after 1993. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. David Allen [*] Abstract This article applies social network concepts, developed in sociology, to the analysis of the self-employment decision. Theory suggests that if one's social network provides social [...]

Most economic research about self-protection against crime concentrates on self-protection by individuals, households, and stores – private economic agents. We know much less about self-protection in public economic settings, such as by schools; this article takes a step towards learning more. An economic agent who self-protects benefits by reducing vulnerability to crime but incurs self-protection costs whether a victimization occurs or not; should a crime occur, the agent further bears the cost of the victimization itself. The agent, a school administrator in this application, must determine the optimal level of self-protection within this environment. Empirical results obtained using data from the 2004 and 2006 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) show that schools self-protect (use professional security personnel) much in line with theoretical predictions. Among other findings, schools located in larger cities and that have a larger and older student body self-protect more prevalently than other schools, while schools with more academically able students self-protect less than schools with less productive student inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how worker productivity and risk factors affect the demand for younger and older workers modeled using concepts from labor economics. The two primary National Football League player labor markets—the draft process and veteran free agent market—provide rich empirical environments for testing hypotheses from the model. Clubs demonstrate greater demand for rookies by drafting them earlier and for veterans by signing them faster. Greater physical productivity enhances labor demand for all players, but risk factors exert a more severe labor market penalty for veterans, patterns consistent with theory and with previous research on the demand for risky workers and older workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]