The past decade has been marked by historic opinions regarding the culpability of juveniles by the US Supreme Court. In 2005, the death penalty was abolished, 5 years later, life without parole for crimes, other than homicide, was banned, and then just last year, mandatory life sentences for any crime was abolished. The court referenced developmental science in all these cases. In this article,...

Before the abolition of the death penalty for homicide the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 defined 18 years as the minimum age for execution, the last teenager to be hanged being "Flossie" Forsythe in 1960 at the age of 18. Prior to 1966 a murderer could "hang by the neck until dead" and due to this courts were more ready to allow a culprit to be termed "insane". Since then the number of "i...

Social control and the enforcement of social norms glue a society together. It has been shown theoretically and empirically that informal punishment of wrongdoers fosters cooperation in human groups. Most of this research has focused on voluntary and uncoordinated punishment carried out by individual group members. However, as punishment is costly, it is an open question as to why humans engage...

OBJECTIVES Corporal punishment is still widely practiced around the globe, despite the large body of child development research that substantiates its short- and long-term consequences. Within this context, this paper examined the relationship between parental use of corporal punishment and youth externalizing behavior with a Chilean sample to add to the growing empirical evidence concerning th...

An experiment with adult humans investigated the effects of response-contingent money loss (response-cost punishment) on monetary-reinforced responding. A yoked-control procedure was used to separate the effects on responding of the response-cost contingency from the effects of reduced reinforcement density. Eight adults pressed buttons for money on a three-component multiple reinforcement sche...

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and t...

This paper examines the link between currency unions and customs unions. The size of a bloc of countries practising some form of co-ordination of monetary policy is limited by the incentive to free-ride that formation of the bloc creates. However, when the threat of a trade war is introduced, the stable size of the bloc increases. This suggests that a) large currency areas are more likely to em...

This paper shows that on average, firms with higher levels of capital intensity experience larger responses in equity price to monetary policy action. This heterogeneous effect is economically large and statistically significant at high levels of confidence. These results suggest that monetary policy has important and substantial distributional implications on the US economy that can be measure...

We investigate whether peer punishment is an efficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation in an experiment with a long time horizon. Previous evidence suggests that the costs of peer punishment can be outweighed by the benefits of higher cooperation if (i) there is a sufficiently long time horizon and (ii) punishment cannot be avenged. However, in most instances in daily life, when individuals...