This paper investigates the impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. Following the literature on wage inequality and skill-biased technological change, we employ CPS data to create state-year as well as state-year-and (broad) industry specific measures of skill-biased technological...

This paper studies the impact of adult prosecution on recidivism and employment trajectories for adolescent, first-time felony defendants. We use extensive linked Criminal Justice Admin- istrative Record System and socio-economic data from Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit). Using the discrete age...

We estimate the impact of financial sanctions in the U.S. criminal justice system using nine distinct natural experiments across five states. These regression discontinuity designs capture a range of enforcement levels ($17-$6,000) and institutional environments, providing robust causal evidence...

Using National Youth Survey (NYS) data, we examine the relationship of current criminal activity and past arrests using an ordered probit model with unobserved heterogeneity. Past arrests raise current criminal activity only for the non-criminal type, while past criminal experience raises...

We present a dynamic two-period model of individual behaviour with heterogeneous agents in which individuals decide how to allocate their disposable time between education, crime and work in the legal sector. Education has a twofold effect: it implies higher expected wages in the legal sector,...

Three quarters of American children have been exposed to neighborhood violence in their lifetimes. Most of the existing research has concluded that exposure to violence leads to restricted emotional development, aggressive behavior and poor school outcomes. However, this literature fails to...

To theoretically and empirically explore whether social interaction, either local and global, influences the incidence of corruption, we first present an interaction-based model which predicts that the level of corruption is positively associated with social interaction. We then empirically...

This study is the first in the economics literature to explore the labor market consequences of sexual violence toward women. Using data from the Add Health, we find that sexual violence against women is associated with a 6.6 percent lower probability of labor force participation and 5.1 percent...

This paper discusses the relationship between education and crime from an economic perspective, developing a human capital-based model that sheds light on key ways in which early childhood programs and policies that encourage schooling may affect both juvenile and adult crime. The paper first...

A growing body of work suggests that education offers a wide-range of benefits that extend beyond increases in labor market productivity. Improvements in education can lower crime, improve health, and increase voting and democratic participation. This chapter reviews recent developments on these...