Regulating Vice and Regulating Organized Crime

3 Credits

For this course, vice is defined as a habit with bad consequences that can generate large black markets if the market for supplying that habit is prohibited or heavily regulated. Vice if found in all modern societies, though in widely differing forms, depending on population characteristics, culture and law. Society's decision is how to regulate it, whether criminally or otherwise, and how then to assess whether the regulation is successful. This assessment has multiple components, including: choosing outcome measures; modeling counterfactuals for which the evidence is often very indirect and developing a framework for ensuring that comparisons reflect all relevant outcomes and values.