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Journal Article
Economics and crime in the states
Polls identify crime as the number one public worry. Crime also exacts tremendous costs not factored into official measures of well-being, and it is a favorite subject of political campaign promises. However, the public seems largely unaware that crime responds to economic conditions and incentives and that the results of a substantial body of work by economists have important implications for public policy. ; This article introduces the economics and crime literature by describing a simple supply-and-demand crime model in which criminals supply crime, the public demands protection from ...
Journal Article
Paying for crime and punishment
Criminals aren't the only ones who pay for their crimes - so does everyone else, in the form of taxes to build and operate prisons and put police on the streets. With a slow economy contributing to a rise in crime, the associated costs may also be on the rise.
Journal Article
Report outlines new efforts to combat counterfeiting abroad
Journal Article
Alternatives to youth incarceration
Practitioners and policymakers across the country are recognizing that alternatives to youth incarceration can yield better outcomes not only for youth and communities, but also for taxpayers.
Journal Article
It takes a village: communities tackle crime
To achieve safety improvements that are sustainable, residents, developers, and police must work together to mobilize neighbors and transform places.
Journal Article
Murder mystery
Working Paper
Testing economic hypotheses with state-level data: a comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001)
State-level data are often used in the empirical research of both macroeconomists and microeconomists. Using data that follows states over time allows economists to hold constant a host of potentially confounding factors that might contaminate an assignment of cause and effect. A good example is a fascinating paper by Donohue and Levitt (2001, henceforth DL), which purports to show that hypothetical individuals resulting from aborted fetuses, had they been born and developed into youths, would have been more likely to commit crimes than youths resulting from fetuses carried to term. We ...
Journal Article
The effects of school quality on juvenile crime
This essay-the 2001 winner of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's undergraduate essay competition, Essays in Economics-investigates whether students who attend higher-quality schools commit fewer crimes. If so, improving school quality might be worth considering as an approach to reducing juvenile crime. The author finds some evidence that higher-quality schools are associated with lower probabilities of committing some types of crime.
Working Paper
What accounts for the decline in crime?
The authors? dynamic equilibrium model guides their quantitative investigation of the major determinants of property-crime patterns in the U.S. The model is capable of reproducing the drop in property crime that occurred between 1980 and 1996. The most important influences on the decline are a higher probability of apprehension, a stronger economy, and the aging of the population. The effect of unemployment on crime is negligible. Increased inequality in earnings prevented an even larger decline in crime. The authors? analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime ...
Working Paper
Blowing it up and knocking it down: the effect of demolishing high concentration public housing on crime
Despite popular accounts that link public housing demolitions to spatial redistribution of crime, and possible increases in crime, little systematic research has analyzed the neighborhood or citywide impact of demolitions on crime. In Chicago, which has conducted the largest public housing demolition program in the United States, I find that public housing demolitions are associated with a 10 percent to 20 percent reduction in murder, assault, and robbery in neighborhoods where the demolitions occurred. Furthermore, violent crime rates fell by about the same amount in neighborhoods that ...