Crime and Economic Incentives

By Stephen Machin, C. Meghir. The Journal of human resources, 2000

624 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore the role that economic incentives, particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution, play in determining crime rates. We use data on the police force areas of England and Wales between 1975 and 1996 and find (relative) falls in the wages of low-wage workers lead to increases in crime. We carry out a number of experiments with different wage measures, including a wage measure that accounts for the effects of changes in the composition of employment. These reinforce the picture of a strong association between the low-wage labor market and crime. The result that incentives play a central role is reinforced further by the strong impact on crime of deterrence measures and of a measure of the returns to crime.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36ddc7cae36aad3873320f1ba0942ca219f1351e

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Environmental Crime and Punishment: Empirical Evidence from the German Penal Code (2010, positive): “…crime.1 Building on Becker’s seminal paper on the economics of crime (Becker 1968) and its modern implementations (e.g., Rickman and Witt 2007; Machin and Meghir 2004; Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza 2002), this paper makes three contributions: The first is to examine whether empirical…”
Generating Employment in Poor and Fragile States: Evidence from Labor Market and Entrepreneurship Programs (2015, methodology): “See Freeman (1999) for a review and for more recent contributions, Fougére et al. (2009); Gould et al. (2002). (105)Levitt (2004) (106)Draca and Machin (2015) (107)See the review by Kautz et al.”
Crime and Immigration: Evidence from Large Immigrant Waves (2013, positive): “…to engage in criminal activity if The usefulness of this framework for interpreting our results comes from the key prediction that relative labour market opportunities matter (there is good evidence from elsewhere supporting this – see, inter alia , Gould et al., 2002, and Machin and Meghir, 2004).”
The Crime Reducing Effect of Education (2010, neutral): “University College London, CEP, London School of Economics and IZA”
Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods (2017, background): “13An extensive literature links rising unemployment, higher poverty, and declines in wages for low-wage workers to increases in property crimes, with little or no change in violent crimes (Machin and Meghir, 2004; Raphael and Winter-Ebmer, 2001).”
Non-Production Benefits of Education: Crime, Health, and Good Citizenship (2011, result): “…discourages participation in crime.3 This is consistent with numerous recent studies that show that higher wages reduce crime (e.g. Grogger 1998, Machin and Meghir 2004, Gould, et al. 2002) and decades of research in labor economics showing that education increases wage rates (see, e.g., Card…”