The importance of family background and neighborhood effects as determinants of crime

Abstract

We quantify the importance of family background and neighborhood effects as determinants of criminal convictions and incarceration by estimating sibling correlations. At the extensive margin, factors common to siblings account for 24 % of the variation in criminal convictions and 39 % of the variation in incarceration. At the intensive margin, these factors typically account for slightly less than half of the variation in prison sentence length and between one third and one half of the variation in criminal convictions, depending on crime type and gender. Further analysis shows that parental criminality and family structure can account for more of the sibling crime correlation than parental income and education or neighborhood characteristics. The lion's share of the sibling correlation, however, is unaccounted for by

On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations

“…Overall, we provide evidence that the scope for neighborhood effects in entrepreneurship in general, and incorporation in particular, is rather limited, usually less than 11 percent. This result is in line with previous literature using income, education or crime as outcomes: neighborhood effects typically explain less than 10 percent of variance (Solon et al, 2000;Page and Solon, 2003a,b;Lindahl, 2011;Nicoletti and Rabe, 2013;Eriksson et al, 2016). Our results also help put into perspective the previous results of Giannetti and Simonov (2009) and Guiso et al (2015).…”

“…Unlike the bulk of the sibling correlation literature, where closely spaced siblings tend to have more similar outcomes than widely spaced siblings (see, e.g., Eriksson et al, 2016), we find that sibling correlations are unaffected by birth spacing.…”

“…22 There are two competing expectations about the relationship between spacings and sibling correlations (Eriksson et al, 2016). On the one hand, siblings born closer together interact more intensively, which should lead to higher sibling correlations at low birth spacings.…”

“…Compare column (1) in Table 4 to column (3) in Appendix Results for entrepreneurship and incorporation in Figure 1 suggest that while twin correlations are higher than non-twin correlations, the latter do not display an evident relationship with birth spacing (this pattern is common across outcomes, see Figure C.1 in Appendix C). This is quite interesting, given that in the bulk of the sibling correlation literature sibling spacing tends to matter quite a lot: the outcomes of closely spaced siblings are typically much more similar than those of widely spaced siblings (see, e.g., Eriksson et al, 2016). However, entrepreneurship may often materialize when individuals have long ago left the household.…”

“…A useful method for exploring such peer effects has been proposed by Altonji et al (2016), who apply it to the study of illegal substance abuse, and subsequently used by Eriksson et al (2016) to look at criminal activity. The method relies on the relatively strong assumptions that only older siblings can influence younger siblings and that parental influences are not a mediating channel.…”