Intuitively, by increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activities, positive economic shocks should reduce crime. However, the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic shocks and criminal behavior is at best ambiguous. This may be because certain types of shocks...

I review recent developments in the economic analysis of crime, focusing in particular on organized crime and corruption. I first discuss the main challenges to the empirical identification of causal relationships – namely, measurement error due to endogenous reporting of crime and the fact...

The equilibrium conditions for an economic system that produces output with several factors of production and which is subject to technological constraints are derived. Optimization of either output minus cost or integrated utility yields the conditions that output elasticities must be equal to...