This paper shows that participation in crime and involvement with the criminal justice system has reached extraordinary levels among young men. With approximately 2 percent as many men incarcerated as in the labor force, the crime rate should have plummeted. It didn't. Evidence suggests that the...

We evaluate the deterrence effects of the age of criminal responsibility on total drug trafficking and homicide crimes per age, based on a quasi-experiment generated by differences in punishment severity for these crimes prescribed by the Statute of the Child and Adolescent and by the Penal Code...

In this paper we explore the relationship between crime and work using data for a cohort sample of young men. We find that working and going to school significantly decrease the probability of committing criminal acts and by virtually identical amounts. Parochial school education and higher IQ...

Compulsory schooling laws (CSL) are often advocated for fighting crime. While this has generally worked for the US/Europe, it may not necessarily be the case. Exploiting the large exogenous variation in compulsory high schooling of 15-17 year olds introduced by the 2009 Brazilian Constitutional...

Over 130,000 juveniles are detained in the US each year with 70,000 in detention on any given day, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts social and human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses...

Bias crime statistics legislation does not require law enforcement agencies to collect data on the ages of bias crime perpetrators, and bias crime penalty enhancements do not distinguish between youth and adult offenders. As a result, little data exists on youth bias crime, and the consequences...

Many rights are conferred on Dutch youth at ages 16 and 18. Using national register data for all reported victimizations, we find sharp and discontinuous increases in victimization rates at these ages: about 13% for both genders at 16 and 9% (15%) for males (females) at 18. These results are...