Volume 13, Issue 4

We present new evidence on the causal impact of education on crime, by considering a large expansion of the UK post-compulsory education system that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The education expansion raised education levels across the whole education distribution and, in particular for our analysis, at the bottom end enabling us to develop an instrumental variable strategy to study the crime- education relationship. At the same time as the education expansion, youth crime fell, revealing a significant cross-cohort relationship between crime and education. The causal crime reducing effect of education is estimated to be negative and significant, and considerably bigger in (absolute) magnitude than ordinary least squares estimates. The education boost also significantly impacted other productivity-related economic variables (qualification attainment and wages), demonstrating that the incapacitation effect of additional time spent in school is not the sole driver of the results.

This study examines the effects of private schooling on adolescent non-market behaviors. We control for differences between private and public school students by making use of the rich set of covariates available with our NELS micro-dataset. We also employ an instrumental-variables strategy that exploits variation across metropolitan areas in the costs that parents face in transporting their children to private schools, which stem from differences in the quality of the local transportation infrastructure. We find evidence to suggest that religious private schooling reduces involvement in the most consequential risky behaviors such as teen sexual activity, arrests, and use of hard drugs (cocaine), but not drinking, smoking and marijuana use.

Violence is one of the leading social problems in both Europe and the United States. The development of appropriate public policies to curtail violence is confounded by the relationship between alcohol and violence. In this article, we estimate the propensity of alcohol control policies to reduce the perpetration and victimization of criminal violence. We measure violence with data on individual-level victimizations from the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey. We examine the effects of a number of different alcohol control policies in reducing violent crime. These policies include the retail price of beer, drunk driving laws and penalties, keg laws and serving and selling laws. We find some evidence of a negative relationship between alcohol prices and the probability of alcohol- or drug-related assault victimizations. However, we find no strong evidence that other alcohol policies are effective in reducing violent crimes.

This paper analyses the 13 business cycles since 1933 to provide evidence on the old question of whether recessions cause crime. Using data from the United States, we find that recessions are consistently associated with an uptick in burglary and robbery, and a reduction in theft of motor vehicles. There is no statistical association with homicide. These patterns are suggestive of the relative importance of the various channels by which economic conditions influence crime.

The article provides new evidence on the effects of a major shock to deterrence on crime. The collapse of communism in the Czech Republic in 1989 was followed by sharp reductions in the probability and severity of punishment and by sharp increases in crime rates. I investigate whether deterrence was a significant contributor to the post-1989 growth in crime on a panel dataset of Czech regions. The results show strong deterrence effects for robbery, theft and intentional injury, but not for murder and rape. About 25% of the increase in robberies and 50% of the growth in thefts is accounted for by weaker deterrence.

Rasmusen (1996) has shown that inmates not only suffer public penalties but also economic and social stigma. In this article, we analyse the economic consequences of imprisonment which can be identified as lower wages and difficulty in re-entering the labour market. Analysing data from a German survey, we find that having been in prison reduces the probability of finding a job and that the total time sentenced to imprisonment reduces both labour market opportunities and earnings. The penalty is worst for those who have committed murder.