Guns, Drugs and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Panel of Siblings and Twins

Using a nationally-representative panel data set of U.S. high school students (AddHealth data) that contains a relatively large sample of siblings and twins, the paper investigates the impacts of gun availability at home and individual drug use on robbery, burglary, theft and damaging property for juveniles. Using a variety of fixed-effects models that exploit variations over time, the results show that gun availability at home increases the propensity to committing robbery, burglary and theft by about two percentage points for juveniles but has no impact on damaging property. It is unlikely that gun availability is merely a measure of the unobserved home environment because gun availability does not influence other risky or bad behaviors of juveniles. The results show that having access to guns increases the probability of being cut or stabbed by someone and of someone pulling a knife or gun on the juvenile. Estimates obtained from models that exploit variations over time and between siblings and twins indicate that the median impact of cocaine use on the propensity to commit various types of crimes is 23 percentage points. The impact of using inhalants or other drugs is an increase in the propensity to commit crime by 14 and 18 percentage points, respectively.

Catholic Schools and Bad Behavior: A Propensity Score Matching Analysis

Although there is a sizeable literature on the effect of private school attendance on academic student outcomes, the number of studies that investigate the impact of school sector on non-academic outcomes is limited. Using a rich data set, we analyze the impact of Catholic school attendance on the likelihood that teenagers use or sell drugs, commit property crime, have sex, join gangs, attempt suicide, and run away from home. We employ propensity score matching methods to control for the endogeneity of school choice. Catholic school attendance reduces the propensity to use cocaine and to have sex for female students. However, it increases the propensity to use and sell drugs for male students.

Nonprofit Sector and Part-Time Work: An Analysis of Employer-Employee Matched Data of Child Care Workers

This paper uses a rich employer-employee matched data set to investigate the existence and the extent of nonprofit and part-time wage and compensation differentials in child care. The empirical strategy adjusts for workers' self-selection into the for-profit or nonprofit sectors, into full-time or part-time work, as well as unobserved worker heterogeneity using a discrete factor model. We find differences between the regimes (full-time for-profit, full-time nonprofit, part-time for-profit, part-time nonprofit) in the way in which human capital of the workers are rewarded. There is substantial variation in wages as a function of employee characteristics, and there is variation in wages within sectors. The results indicate that part-time jobs are good' jobs in center-based child care. Furthermore, despite the evidence supporting the labor donation hypothesis, our results indicate the existence of nonprofit wage and compensation premiums, which support the property rights hypothesis.

Skill-biased Technological Change, Earnings of Unskilled Workers, and Crime

This paper investigates the impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. Following the literature on wage inequality and skill-biased technological change, we employ CPS data to create state-year as well as state-year-and (broad) industry specific measures of skill-biased technological change, which are then used as instruments for unskilled workers' earnings in crime regressions. Regressions that employ state panels reveal that technology-induced variations in unskilled workers' earnings impact property crime with an elasticity of -1, but that wages have no impact on violent crime. The paper also estimates, for the first time in this literature, structural crime equations using micro panel data from NLSY97 and instrumenting real wages of young workers. Using state-year-industry specific technology shocks as instruments yields elasticities that are in the neighborhood of -2 for most types of crime, which is markedly larger than previous estimates. In both data sets there is evidence for asymmetric impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. A decline in earnings has a larger effect on crime in comparison to an increase in earnings by the same absolute value.

The Impact of Incentives on Human Behavior: Can We Make It Disappear? The Case of the Death Penalty

Although decades of empirical research has demonstrated that criminal behavior responds to incentives, non-economists frequently express the belief that human beings are not rational enough to make calculated decisions about the costs and benefits of engaging in crime and therefore, a priori drawing the conclusion that criminal activity cannot be altered by incentives. However, scientific research should not be driven by personal beliefs. Whether or not economic conditions matter or deterrence measures such police, arrests, prison deaths, executions, and commutations provide signals to people is an empirical question, which should be guided by a solid theoretical framework. In this paper we extend the analysis of Mocan and Gittings (2003). We alter the original model in a number of directions to make the relationship between homicide rates and death penalty related outcomes (executions, commutations and removals) disappear. We deliberately deviate from the theoretically consistent measurement of the risk variables originally employed by Mocan and Gittings (2003) in a variety of ways. We also investigate the sensitivity of the results to changes in the estimation sample (removing high executing states for example) and weighting. The basic results are insensitive to these and a variety of other specification tests performed in the paper. The results are often strong enough to even hold up under theoretically meaningless measurements of the risk variables. In summary, the original findings of Mocan and Gittings (2003) are robust, providing evidence that people indeed react to incentives induced by capital punishment. Research findings about the deterrent effect of the death penalty evoke strong feelings, which could be due to political, ideological, religious, or other personal beliefs. Yet, such findings do not mean that capital punishment is good or bad, nor does it provide any judgment about whether capital punishment should be implemented or abolished. It is simply a scientific finding which demonstrates that people react to incentives. Therefore, there is no need to be afraid of this result.