Even I do not get terribly excited by the typical economics paper (a recent example picked at random: “Consumption and Labour Supply with Partial Insurance: An Analytical Framework”). But a couple of recent titles grabbed me and, much as I wanted to, I couldn’t look away.

One was “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization”, while the other was the more sobering “Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles”. Very different pieces of research, but both inhabit the tiny niche of the economics of crime.

Economists are interested in crime, of course: it’s big business and has a big impact on ordinary people. The trouble is that the conventional tools of empirical economics are usually brought to bear on publicly available price data, company accounts and national statistics. Inconveniently, Mafiosi rarely file statements of quarterly earnings.

An alternative economic approach is to look closely at everyday life and think about what you see. I try to follow this advice myself, and it is elegantly demonstrated in a wide-ranging new book from Robert Frank, The Economic Naturalist. And yet neither I nor, to my knowledge, Frank, have spent much time buying crack cocaine or observing human resources policy in the local street gang.

In case you’re wondering why, just think back to those images of Michael Dukakis in a tank or William Hague in a baseball cap, and you’ll get a sense of how badly an economist would blend in with a gang of racketeers.

So what’s a nerdy economist to do? The answer is: division of labour. The most famous study of the economics of crime was carried out by the mild-mannered Steven Levitt; despite his gung-ho reputation, Levitt stayed on campus, relying on information gathered from Chicago’s projects by the bold (read “foolhardy”) sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh. (Venkatesh, incredibly, was entrusted with detailed accounts of a drug gang.)

These new studies also rely on someone else to collect the data. Peter Leeson’s “An-arrgh-chy” taps contemporary accounts of pirate life from the golden age of Atlantic piracy, 1630 to 1730. Phillip Killicoat’s “Weaponomics” collates field reports and accounts from journalists in an attempt to measure the price of Kalashnikov assault rifles at different times and places.

Leeson’s message is that pirate crews faced a serious challenge of governance. Without any possible appeal to a higher legal body, pirates were forced to create their own organisations, constitutions and checks on executive power. Traditionally, a ship’s captain had absolute authority over the crew; the resulting abuses of power in the official navies and merchant navies were so appalling that they served as recruiting tools for the pirates.

Pirate captains adopted a different approach. They retained authority over strategy, tactics and navigation, but delegated discipline, rations and punishments to the quartermaster, who was elected by the crew. Leeson, following a tradition of libertarian economic thinking, argues that this form of private-sector piratical governance was far more effective than the official state-sponsored version.

“An-arrgh-chy” is a bit of fun, but Phillip Killicoat’s study of Kalashnikov prices makes for grim reading. Kalashnikovs boast a 20 per cent share of a market whose main output is 200,000 to 400,000 deaths each year. Killicoat argues that the AK-47’s popularity is down to technological “lock-in” of the kind that is widely thought to have given us the QWERTY keyboard. Kalashnikovs are cheap and easy to repair, but are successful because they were cheap and easy to repair before their rivals were, as well as being widely distributed by the Soviet Union. New competitors face high barriers to entry, because existing militias have training and spare parts for the AK-47.

Arms dealers of the future, take note.

Tim Harford’s book “The Undercover Economist’ (Little, Brown) is out in paperback