Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Economics of crime: The economics of crime applies economic principles to understand criminal behavior, its causes, and the effectiveness of crime prevention strategies. It views crime as a rational decision, analyzing how individuals weigh the potential benefits and costs of criminal activities. See also Rational choice, Decisions, Decision theory, Rationality._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Economic Theories on Economics of Crime - Dictionary of Arguments
Parisi I 47 Economics of crime/Economic theories/Gelbach/Klick: (...) [there is] one subfield, broadly construed, in which many techniques popularized in the credibility revolution have been deployed: economics of crime, which offers examples of both missteps and plausible successes.(see Donahue and Wolfers 2005(1)). Policy and crime: The effect of policing on crime has been studied extensively for many decades, but many early studies were tough to swallow. One literature review in the late 1980s noted that the majority of empirical studies found either no relationship or even a positive relationship between police and crime (Cameron, 1988)(2). Causality: While it is possible that there is no causal relationship between policing and crime, even the credulous might have a hard time imagining how police add measurably to the kind of crime generally studied. Omitted variable bias: It is much easier to imagine that these studies suffer from omitted variable bias, with police having been added as crime rose. >Economic models/Gelbach/Klick. Parisi I 48 Steven Levitt: thesis: against this backdrop, Steven Levitt’s influential 1997(3) paper hypothesized that, in order to seek election, mayors and governors attempt to credibly signal that they are tough on crime by hiring more police prior to election day. Because elections in U.S. jurisdictions virtually always follow a pre-set schedule, their timing is not affected by crime or anything related to crime. Thus, election timing might generate observable shocks to police hiring, allowing IV estimation to measure the causal effect of police on crime. Levitt found that the number of police had a large negative effect on crime after addressing the omitted variable problem through his election instrument. McCraryVsLevitt: Levitt’s design was ingenious, but unfortunately, it was also wrong. Justin McCrary later showed that Levitt’s results were driven by coding errors related to how Levitt weighted his data (McCrary, 2002)(4). In his note discussing Levitt’s error, McCrary concluded, “In the absence of stronger research designs, or perhaps heroic data collection, a precise estimate of the causal effect of police on crime will remain at large” (2002(4), p. 1242). LevittVsMcCrary: In a published reply to McCrary, Levitt (2002) himself offered an alternative instrumental variables-based approach, using the number of municipal firefighters per capita to instrument for the size of police forces. If municipalities with more firefighters are more willing to hire public sector workers generally, then they should also hire more police, all else equal; Gelbach/Klick: Levitt’s estimates suggest this is true empirically, which establishes the first condition for instrument validity. As long as deployment of firefighters isn’t either causally or coincidentally related to crime trends, the number of firefighters won’t be associated with crime outside of its association with police force size; that would establish the second condition. Levitt’s newer instrumental variables estimates suggest an elasticity of crime with respect to police force size of between −0.4 and −0.5, though these estimates are relatively imprecise. >Terrorism/Economic theories. Parisi I 49 Additional research approaches exploiting variation in policing driven by sources other than terrorism concerns have generated estimates comparable to those just discussed. William Evans and Emily Owens exploit the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which funded hiring of additional police officers through the Community Oriented Policing Services program (Evans and Owens, 2007)(5). While applications for the grants and the awarding of the grants could potentially be endogenous to unobservable variables related to crime, they do not find any relationship between ultimate awards and pre-funding crime trends, ruling out the most direct source of endogeneity. Evans and Owens find elasticities that are similar to those found in the terrorism-related studies. John MacDonald, Jonathan Klick, and Ben Grunwald use the largely arbitrary boundary separating high and low policing areas around the University of Pennsylvania campus as the basis for an RD design (MacDonald, Klick, and Grunwald, 2016)(6). They observe that the Penn police force does not patrol beyond the historical campus boundary, while areas inside and outside that boundary are otherwise quite similar. These authors find a statistically significant negative effect of police on crime, of a magnitude nearly identical to that found in the terrorism-related studies. >Terrorism/Economic theories. 1. Donohue, John J. and Justin Wolfers (2005). “Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate.” Stanford Law Review 58(3): 791–846. 2. Cameron, Samuel (1988). “The Economics of Crime Deterrence: A Survey of Theory and Evidence.” Kyklos 41(2): 301–323. 3. Levitt, Steven D. (1997). “Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring To Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime.” American Economic Review 87(3): 270–290. 4. McCrary, Justin (2002). “Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime: Comment.” American Economic Review 92(4): 1236–1243. 5. Evans, William N. and Emily G. Owens (2007). “COPS and Crime.” Journal of Public Economics 91(1–2): 181–201. 6. MacDonald, John, Jonathan Klick, and Ben Grunwald (2016). “The Effect of Private Police on Crime: Evidence from a Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 179(3): 831–846. Gelbach, Jonah B. and Jonathan Klick „Empirical Law and Economics“. In: Parisi, Francesco (ed) (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics. Vol 1: Methodology and Concepts. NY: Oxford University Press._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Economic Theories Parisi I Francesco Parisi (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics: Volume 1: Methodology and Concepts New York 2017 |
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> Counter arguments against Economic Theories
> Counter arguments in relation to Economics of Crime
Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-29