The Effect of Convicton on Income Through the Life Cycle

Existing studies of the impact of conviction on income and employment do not consider life cycle issues. We postulate that conviction reduces access to career jobs offering stable, long-term employment. Instead, conviction relegates offenders to spot market jobs, which may have higher pay at the outset of the career but do not offer stable employment or rapidly rising wages. Thus, first-time conviction may increase the wages of young workers while decreasing the wages of older workers. We test our theory with data on federal offenders and find that first-time conviction has a positive and significant effect on income for offenders under age 25 and an increasingly negative and significant impact for offenders over age 30. These results imply that the present value of income lost as a result of conviction varies over the life cycle, reaching a maximum in the middle of the career. We find that the gains sought by these offenders follow similar profiles, suggesting that prospective offenders are deterred by the possibility of lost future income. Because the discounted loss in future income facing young offenders may be small, our results may provide part of an explanation of youth crime.

Monitoring, Motivation and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation. Employees are 'rational cheaters,' who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the perceived marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost. Managers respond to this decision calculus by implementing monitoring and incentive pay practices that lessen the attraction of shirking. This 'rational cheater model' is not the only model of opportunistic behavior, and indeed is viewed skeptically by human resource practitioners and by many non-economists who study employment relationships. We investigate the 'rational cheater model' using data from a double-blind field experiment that allows us to observe the effect of experimentally-induced variations in monitoring on employee opportunism. The experiment is unique in that it occurs in the context of an ongoing employment relationship, i.e., with the firm's employees producing output as usual under the supervision of their front-line managers. The results indicate that a significant fraction of employees behave roughly in ccordance with the 'rational cheater model.' We also find, however, that a substantial proportion of employees do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to employee assessments about their general treatment by the emp loyer.

An Empirical Analysis of Web Site Stickiness

Even though we have seen an exponential growth in the number of Web sites and the number of users, little is known about Web usage at the level of the individual. This paper aims to overcome this lack of knowledge on individual usage patterns. Based on previous findings on saturation of Web usage, we use data from 1995-1998 on residential Web usage conducted as part of the HomeNet project to examine if groups of Web users differ in loyalty to Web sites. We also measure the stickiness of the most popular Web sites in the HomeNet sample. The results help us to understand how one should think of Internet usage and have important implications for Internet marketing and strategy

A Session Based Empirical Investigation of Web Usage

This paper reports the results of a study of Web usage of 139 users over a 8 month period of time. It uses a longitudinal Web log analysis of the URLs accessed during 33916 user-days of Web usage. It aims to detect changes in Web usage associated with increased experience of using the Web. Specifically, it answers the question whether or not users shift from undirected browsing in the Web to directed access of Web sites as they gain expertise in using the Web. We used a session-based approach to measure individual Web usage. The results of our study have several important implications both for Business to Consumer electronic commerce and for public policy as it pertains to the digital divide

Effects of Adolescent Victimization on Offending: Flexible Methods for Missing Data & Unmeasured Confounding

The causal link between victimization and violence later in life is largely accepted but has been understudied for victimized adolescents. In this work we use the Add Health dataset, the largest nationally representative longitudinal survey of adolescents, to estimate the relationship between victimization and future offending in this population. To accomplish this, we derive a new doubly robust estimator for the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) when the treatment and outcome are not always observed. We then find that the offending rate among victimized individuals would have been 3.86 percentage points lower if none of them had been victimized (95% CI: [0.28, 7.45]). This contributes positive evidence of a causal effect of victimization on future offending among adolescents. We further present statistical evidence of heterogeneous effects by age, under which the ATT decreases according to the age at which victimization is experienced. We then devise a novel risk-ratio-based sensitivity analysis and conclude that our results are robust to modest unmeasured confounding. Finally, we show that the found effect is mainly driven by non-violent offending