Discussion Paper - No. 2044 October 2024 - Crime and the labor

The Growth of the Economics of Crime Note – This figure plots the annual number of publications in the Economics of Crime field, including a decomposition in the style of research: theoretical, non-causal empirical, and causal empirical. [...] Sixth, new doors are being opened in the field to study questions beyond the Becker framework, like the costs of crime victimization (including labor market costs) and the role of criminal organizations; we offer a discussion of these especially new literatures in the conclusion. [...] At the same time, studying the link between crime and the labor market in an international context is motivated by the fact that the US is an outlier in many dimensions, three of which are depicted in Figure 3, related to crime and the criminal justice system. [...] They use a wage measure based on the 25th percentile of the distribution and empirically find that the marginal effect of a 10 percent increase in the wage measure corresponds to 0.7 percentage point fall in the crime rate. [...] Differently from other types of crime, the dynamics of domestic violence and its reporting may depend on the bargaining power of both the offender and the victim.