Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature

Chalfin, Aaron; McCrary, Justin

doi:10.1257/jel.20141147

Cited by 493 publications

(318 citation statements)

References 195 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

279

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We note that these coefficients, however, are close in magnitude to the least-squares estimates. This is consistent with the idea that, as a result of political and operational constraints, police hiring, in practice, is less endogenous than has been supposed and that measurement errors in police data are less severe at the state rather than at the local level (Chalfin and McCrary, 2017b).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 89%

More cops, fewer prisoners?

Kaplan

Chalfin

2019

Criminology & Public Policy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research Summary The results reported in a large amount of the criminology literature reveal that hiring police officers leads to reductions in crime and that investments in police are an efficient means of crime control compared with investments in prisons. One concern, however, is that because police officers make arrests in the course of their duties, police hiring, albeit efficient, is an inevitable driver of “mass incarceration.” In this article, we consider the dynamics through which police hiring affects downstream incarceration rates. Policy Implications Using state‐level panel data as well county‐level data from California, we uncover novel evidence in favor of a potentially unexpected and yet entirely intuitive result: that investments in law enforcement are unlikely to increase state prison populations markedly and may even lead to a modest decrease in the number of state prisoners. As such, investments in police may, in fact, yield a “double dividend” to society by reducing incarceration rates as well as crime rates.

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 89%

More cops, fewer prisoners?

Kaplan

Chalfin

2019

Criminology & Public Policy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The model has proved valuable in highlighting the economic incentives associated with criminal activity and its basic predictions on incentive and deterrence effects on crime has received substantial empirical support (see the reviews of Freeman, 1999, the introduction of Cook at al., 2013, andChalfin andMcCrary, 2014). Its weakness and limitation for our purposes is that it is explicitly static.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crime Scars: Recessions and the Making of Career Criminals

Bell

Bindler

Machin

2018

The Review of Economics and Statistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that have a sustained detrimental effect on their wages and career progression. This paper uses a range of US and UK data to document a more disturbing long-run effect of recessions: young people who leave school in the midst of recessions are significantly more likely to lead a life of crime than those graduating into a buoyant labour market. These effects are long lasting and substantial.

show abstract

“…First, unlike the shocks considered in Hsu, Matsa, and Melzer (2018) and Di Maggio and Kermani (2016), which were temporary in nature, the increased import competition from China was much more permanent. As Chalfin and McCrary (2017) note, the link between employment and crime may be a result of behavioral changes (e.g., displaced workers 5. Finally, while foreclosures and consumption are clearly affected by UI's ability to buffer short-run income shocks, income loss is only one of the many drivers of crime.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Losing by Less? Import Competition, Unemployment Insurance Generosity, and Crime

Beach

Lopresti

2019

Economic Inquiry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Increased import competition from China has brought about a host of negative consequences for the most exposed industries and labor markets. Do social programs attenuate these harmful effects? We examine changes in import competition between 1990 and 2007, taking crime as our outcome of interest and unemployment insurance as our mitigating program. We find strong evidence that counties with access to more generous unemployment insurance experienced relatively smaller increases in tradeinduced property crime. This highlights a new and important positive externality of unemployment insurance. (JEL H00, R10)

show abstract

Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature

Cited by 493 publications

References 195 publications

More cops, fewer prisoners?

More cops, fewer prisoners?

Crime Scars: Recessions and the Making of Career Criminals

Losing by Less? Import Competition, Unemployment Insurance Generosity, and Crime

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About