ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INCOME REDISTRIBUTION AND CRIME

By Ayse Imrohoroglu, Antonio Merlo, Peter Rupert. 2000

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we consider a general equilibrium model where heterogeneous agents specialize either in legitimate market activities or in criminal activities and majority rule determines the share of income redistributed and the expenditures devoted to the apprehension of criminals. We calibrate our model to the U.S. economy in 1990, and we conduct simulation exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of expenditures on police protection and income redistribution at reducing crime. We find that while expenditures on police protection reduce crime, it is possible for the crime rate to increase with redistribution. We also show that economies that adopt relatively more generous redistribution policies may have either higher or lower crime rates than economies with relatively less generous redistribution policies, depending on the characteristics of their wage distribution and on the efficiency of their apprehension technology.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b16950f2dd8bd3ee7bc229719bcc10b268fbc38e

Citations in the corpus

• Juvenile Delinquency and Conformism (2012, unknown): “This approach enables us to capture the inßuence of school level inputs (such as teachers and students quality, and possibly the parents’ residential choices), so that only the variation in the average behavior of peers (across students in the same school) would be exploited.(30) estimates that are ”