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Criminology Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2015

Crime

Economics

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Criminology

The Criminal Justice Response To Policy Interventions: Evidence From Immigration Reform, Sarah Bohn, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens May 2015

The Criminal Justice Response To Policy Interventions: Evidence From Immigration Reform, Sarah Bohn, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens

Matthew Freedman

Changes in the treatment of individuals by the criminal justice system following a policy intervention may bias estimates of the effects of the intervention on underlying criminal activity. We explore the importance of such changes in the context of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Using administrative data from San Antonio, Texas, we examine variation across neighborhoods and ethnicities in police arrests and in the rate at which those arrests are prosecuted. We find that changes in police behavior around IRCA confound estimates of the effects of the policy and its restrictions on employment on criminal activity.

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Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick Jan 2015

Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

It is commonly assumed that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. An important implication of this assumption within the Beckerian law enforcement model is that criminals are risk-seeking. This note adds to existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.

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