Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. The evidence indicates that court debt charged to indigent defendants neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection.

We analyze the impact of short-run (90 days) and long-run (30 years) earthquake risk on real estate transaction prices in five Japanese cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Sapporo), using quarterly data over the period 2006–2015. We exploit a rich panel dataset (331,343 observations) with property characteristics, ward attractiveness information, macroeconomic variables, and long-run seismic hazard data, supplemented with short-run earthquake probabilities generated from a seismic excitation model using historical earthquake occurrences. We design a hedonic property price model that allows for subjective probability weighting, employ a multivariate error components structure, and develop associated maximum likelihood estimation and variance computation procedures. Our approach enables us to identify the total compensation for earthquake risk embedded in property prices, to decompose this into pieces stemming from short-run and long-run risk, and to distinguish between objective and subjectively weighted (“distorted”) earthquake probabilities. We find that objective long-run earthquake probabilities have a statistically significant negative impact on property prices, whereas short-run earthquake probabilities become statistically significant only when we allow them to be distorted. The total compensation for earthquake risk amounts to an average –2.0% of log property prices, slightly more than the annual income of a middle-income Japanese household. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement.