Few empirical studies of the economics of crime have doubted the deterrent effects of the legal sanctions on crime. Those studies, however, have not established a definitive understanding of the effects of labor market conditions on crime. In this paper, we examine the impact of labor market...

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of labor market conditions, represented by male civilian unemployment rates, on seven major categories of crime. We propose a theoretical model from which the positive macro relationship between the unemployment rate and the crime rate is explicitly...