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Hooliganism is on the rise and different countries use different strategies to combat it. We introduce a model where hooligans reap utility from violence and social identity and study the effects of different police strategies. We find that an increase in discriminative policing, provided by intelligence units, for example, always reduces violence. Under the right circumstances, it may also lead to larger supporter clubs and a significant drop in violence. Indiscriminate policing, such as the use of teargas or random jailing of potential law breakers, may, however, backfire and result in smaller and more brutal groups.

Since Adam Smith, most economists have held that a professional army is superior to a conscript army, thanks to benefitting from comparative advantage and specialization. We summarize recent literature on the benefits and costs of the military draft, with special emphasis on its dynamic effects on human capital formation. Empirical evidence refutes the claim that the economic costs of the draft would be balanced by increased democratic control or reduced likelihood of war. Rather, the political allure of conscription seems to arise from the possibility to concentrate the tax burden on a minority of voters in a way that is generally held to be unacceptable with normal taxation.

We propose a Pareto‐improving policy which reduces the overall wage tax burden in an economy with intergenerational trade in a fixed factor of production, here labelled as land. We analyse a second‐best environment in which the government cannot resort to non‐distortionary land taxes. Reducing the social security contribution rate encourages investment in human capital. Future efficiency gains accruing to complementary land are capitalized in its value. The capital gains may compensate land‐owning pensioners for reduced benefits. We also explain why the unfunded pension system may have lost its appeal even for pensioners after its introduction.

We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anti-corruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining access to politicians and, thereby, to become potential candidates for nominations. Such rent-seeking results in excessive network formation. Political parties may reduce wasteful network formation, thanks to their ability to enter into exclusive membership contracts. This holds even though anti-corruption laws also bind political parties.

This paper isolates the causal effect of policing on group violence, using unique panel data on self-reported crime by soccer and ice hockey hooligans. The problem of reverse causality from violence to policing is solved by two drastic reallocations of the Stockholm Supporter Police unit to other activities following the 9/11 terrorist attack in September 2001 and the Tsunami catastrophe in December 2004. Difference-in-difference analysis reveals that Stockholm-related hooligan violence increased dramatically during these periods.

Altruistic parents may transfer resources to their offspring by providing education, and by leaving bequests. We show that in the presence of wage taxation, a small bequest tax may improve efficiency in an overlapping-generations framework with only intended bequests, by enhancing incentives of parents to invest in their children's education. This result holds even if the wage tax rate is held constant when introducing bequest taxation. We also calculate an optimal mix of wage and bequest taxes with alternative parameter combinations. In all cases, the optimal wage tax rate is clearly higher than the optimal bequest tax rate, but the latter is generally positive when the required government revenue in the economy is sufficiently high.

Using panel data for 78 countries of origin we examine the impact of student flows to the United States on subsequent migration there over the period 1971-2001. What we find is that the stock of foreign students is an important predictor of subsequent migration. This holds true whether or not the lagged endogenous variable is included. The relationship is robust to the inclusion of time and country dummies, and remains when we account for outliers. The basic results also hold for a cross section of 36 countries of origin and 9 host countries. Our results have important policy implications which we discuss in the last section.