This introduction to the "IER" symposium on economic models of crime briefly reviews the articles in this issue and tries to put them in the context of the current research on the economics of crime. Copyright 2004 by the Economics Department Of The University Of Pennsylvania And Osaka...

Many unions in the United States have for several years engaged in what is known as pattern bargaining. In this article, we show that pattern bargaining is preferred by a union to both simultaneous industry-wide negotiations and sequential negotiations without a pattern. Allowing for interfirm...

This article analyzes a general equilibrium model in which agents choose to specialize in either legitimate or criminal activities. Expenditures on police to apprehend criminals, as well as income redistribution, are determined endogenously through majority voting. We investigate how crime,...

In this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the United States. We propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: First, the...

We explore the issue of gender differences in education in the context of a two-sex overlapping generations model where men and women of each generation bargain over consumption, number of children, and investment in education of their children. We show that the gender difference implied by our...

Using data from the NLSY79, we structurally estimate a dynamic model of the life cycle decisions of young women. The women make sequential joint decisions about school attendance, work, marriage, fertility, and welfare participation. We use the model to perform counterfactual simulations...

This article develops a simulation estimation algorithm that is particularly useful for estimating dynamic panel data models with unobserved endogenous state variables. Repeated sampling experiments on dynamic probit models with serially correlated errors indicate the estimator has good small...

I describe a strategy for structural estimation that uses simulated maximum likelihood (SML) to estimate the structural parameters appearing in a model's first-order conditions (FOCs). Generalized method of moments (GMM) is often the preferred method for estimation of FOCs, as it avoids...

A particularly challenging use of decision-theoretic models in economics is to forecast the impact of large changes in the environment. The problem we explore in this article is how to gain confidence in a model's ability to predict the impact of such large changes. We show that an approach to...