income distribution police expenditures and crime a political economy perspective in this paper i present a structural approach to investigate empirically the relation between income distribution police expenditures and crime the approach is based on the estimation of an equilibrium model where heterogeneous individuals choose whether to engage in criminal activities and expenditures on police to apprehend criminals are determined endogenously through majority voting i discuss the identification and estimation of the parameters of the structural model using data for the united states jel d72 d78 k42

crime rates and local labor market opportunities in the united states 1979 1997 the labor market prospects of young unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s crime rates show a reverse pattern increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s because young unskilled men commit most crime this paper seeks to establish a causal relationship between the two trends previous work on the relationship between labor markets and crime focused mainly on the relationship between the unemployment rate and crime and found inconclusive results in contrast this paper examines the impact of both wages and unemployment on crime and uses instrumental variables to establish causality we conclude that both wages and unemployment are significantly related to crime but that wages played a larger role in the crime trends over the last few decades these results are robust to the inclusion of deterrence variables controls for simultaneity and controlling for individual and family characteristics

avoiding labor shortages by employer signaling on the importance of good work climate and labor relations reversing the original signaling model this study explains how employers signal the non observable quality of their workplace and thereby reduce labor shortages based on a company data set of 204

what accounts for the decline in crime in this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the united states we propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime our main findings can be summarized as follows first the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996 second the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability the stronger economy and the aging of the population third the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible fourth the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime overall our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century

inefficiencies in the uk milk quota system abstract given that the common agricultural policy cap of the european union has imposed milk marketing quota on producers the fact that they are tradeable in the uk increases economic efficiency nevertheless significant inefficiencies remain modelling work reported here suggests that significantly more quota needed to be transferred from less to more efficient producers in 1996 97 for industry efficiency to be maximised and that a large number of vulnerable inefficient producers remained in milk production it is also shown that despite tradeable quotas a significant number of dairy farmers still achieve a poor match between available quota and production it is argued that the rules on quota trading could be changed to increase efficiency finally it is argued that uk milk producers are incurring costs for acquiring quota which add at least 12 5 to production costs a high price to pay for the market stability which quotas have brought

diseconomies of size with fixed managerial ability managerial ability has important implications for farm growth in this article we first show in a production model that increasing output with a fixed level of managerial ability can lead to a decrease in profits next we discuss the effect that managerial ability has on economies of size in the empirical part economies of size are estimated for a sample of dairy farms using a proxy for managerial ability which is calculated as a technical efficiency index the results show that increasing farm size while holding managerial ability constant can be an important source of diseconomies of size copyright 2003 oxford university press

crime and victimization an economic perspective the recent upward trend in crime rates of developing countries has spurred widespread public concern about personal and proprietary insecurity in some countries the questions of crime violence and victimization are attracting more attention from academics and policy makers than traditional economic problems the objective of this paper is to examine the main issues related to crime and victimization from an economic perspective for this purpose the paper combines a review of the main results established in the literature with original research on the causes of crime and the risk factors of victimization the first section provides a review of the estimates of the costs of crime the main theoretical and empirical research on its causes and the relative advantages of official and survey data on crime the second section presents original work on the main causes of violent crime from a cross country perspective the empirical work starts with a basic model of the economic determinants of homicide and robbery rates in turn this empirical model is extended along five dimensions 1 deterrence factors 2 illegal drug related activities 3 demographic issues 4 income and ethnic polarization and 5 social capital the third section reviews recent case studies of latin american cities that rely on survey data to assess the empirical determinants of the probability of victimization these studies focus on three types of risk factors 1 individual characteristics 2 household characteristics and 3 community characteristics the main conclusions from the previous sections are summarized in section four

on the political economy of income redistribution and crime this article analyzes a general equilibrium model in which agents choose to specialize in either legitimate or criminal activities expenditures on police to apprehend criminals as well as income redistribution are determined endogenously through majority voting we investigate how crime redistribution and police expenditures depend on characteristics of the underlying distribution of income earning abilities and on the apprehension technology our model accounts for the positive correlation between inequality and crime the positive correlation between expenditures on police and redistribution and the lack of correlation between crime and redistribution observed in u s data

decomposition of productivity growth using distance functions the case of dairy farms in three european countries within an output distance function framework the total factor productivity growth index is decomposed into four components technical change technical and allocative efficiency and scale component we estimate stochastic translog output distance functions using panel data from dairy farms over the period 1991 94 for three european countries germany the netherlands and poland results indicate that the change in the productivity growth index in germany 6 and poland 5 are mainly dictated by the technical change component in contrast the productivity growth index in the netherlands 3 is influenced by allocative efficiency components

incentive and incarceration effects in a general equilibrium model of crime an intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters the policy parameters are the length of the prison term the severity of punishment and the amount of police resources the number of crimes in society can be decomposed into an incentive part an incarceration part and a crime competition part the magnitudes of these three components are studied by means of empirical data from england and the us

public safety through private action an economic assessment of bids private actions to avoid and prevent criminal victimisation and assist public law enforcement are vital inputs into the crime control process one form of private action the business improvement district bid appears particularly promising a bid is a non profit organisation created by property owners to provide local public goods usually including public safety our analysis of 30 los angeles bids demonstrates that the social benefits of bid expenditures on security are a large multiple about 20 of the private expenditures crime displacement appears minimal crime reduction in the bid areas has been accompanied by a reduction in arrests suggesting further savings given the vital role of private individuals and firms in determining the effectiveness of the criminal justice system and the quality and availability of criminal opportunities private actions arguably deserve a more central role in the analysis of crime and crime prevention policy 1 but the leading scholarly commentaries on the crime drop during the 1990s have largely ignored the role of the private sector blumstein and wallman 2000 levitt 2004 zimring 2007 the potentially relevant trends include growing reporting rates the growing sophistication and use of alarms monitoring equipment and locks the considerable increase in the employment of private security guards and the decline in the use of cash cook and macdonald 2010 private actions can be encouraged or discouraged through regulation of the insurance industry reducing the costs of private co operation with police and courts gun control measures and other means the justification for such measures is the reasonable presumption that many sorts of private action to avoid mitigate and respond to crime generate substantial externalities business improvement districts bids are a particularly promising institution for harnessing private action to cost effective crime control a bid is a non profit organisation created by neighbourhood property owners to provide local public goods including public safety the organisation has the power to tax all the owners in the district including those who did not sign the original petition previous evaluations of bids in los angeles la indicate that they are successful in reducing crime rates brooks 2008 macdonald et al 2009 we provide a further analysis of the costs and benefits including the effect on arrests and spillovers and we estimate a dose response

technology and efficiency in a panel of italian dairy farms an sgm restricted cost function approach this article employs a short term specification of the symmetric generalised mcfadden sgm cost function capable of accommodating quasi fixed factors and variable returns temporary equilibrium and scale economies are investigated while maintaining the consistency of the estimated model with microeconomic theory and approximation properties it also makes use of a two step procedure to estimate first the technology parameters and then time varying efficiency at farm level no distributional assumptions are required on efficiency as we consider a fixed effect model a balanced panel of italian dairy farms during the years from 1980 to 1992 serves as the case study the results suggest a rigid productive structure during the pre and post quota period moreover italian milk producers are found to exhibit considerable excess capacity and rather low input technical efficiency

the effect of prison population size on crime rates evidence from prison overcrowding litigation simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime to break that simultaneity this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument for changes in the prison population the resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies a one prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen index i crimes per year while calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner

determinants differentiation and development of short term marginal costs in dairy production an empirical analysis for selected regions of the eu this work provides evidence on the determinants cost differentiation and development of short term marginal costs of dairy farms in important production regions of the european union the empirical study is based on the estimation of multi input multi output symmetric generalized mcfadden cost functions using an unbalanced panel data set of the european farm accountancy data network the results show considerable regional differences in the impact of the outputs input prices and fixed factors on marginal costs strong evidence can be found that marginal costs decrease over time and is further underlined by the development of derived regional aggregated short term supply curves marginal cost elasticities and correlation coefficients validate the hypotheses that a high degree of farm specialization large milk output and low milk prices are associated with lower marginal costs furthermore the marginal cost spread in the data sample is analyzed we show that milk output milk yield herd size labor input and fodder production can be attributed to significant marginal cost differentiation of farms whereas for crop and animal output grassland stock of other animals and depreciation only minor differentiation can be found

a model of criminal sanctions that incorporate both deterrence and incapacitation abstract this paper adapts the standard economic model of crime to incorporate both deterrence and incapacitation the results show that adding incapacitation can result in either a longer or a shorter optimal prison term compared to the deterrence only model

workers warriors and criminals social conflict in general equilibrium we incorporate appropriation activities social conflict into canonical models of trade and study how economic shocks and policies affect the intensity of conflict we show that not all shocks that could make society richer reduce conflict positive shocks to labor intensive industries diminish conflict while positive shocks to capital intensive industries increase it the key requirement is that conflict activities be more labor intensive than the economy as this determines how shocks affect the returns and costs of conflict our theory is consistent with several observed patterns of conflict and implies that empirical work should take into account the relative factor intensities of the productive and conflict sectors in each country incorporating appropriation into a canonic general equilibrium model affects what policies may be deemed desirable in order to reduce conflict and generate pareto improvements policy must be distortionary while reforms that appear efficiency enhancing under the unrealistic assumption of perfect property rights may backfire this offers one explanation for why reforms based on traditional models without appropriation may be delayed and become unpopular when implemented and why societies may sympathize with seemingly inefficient redistribution

a model of optimal incapacitation one of the functions of the criminal sanctions of imprisonment and the death sentence is to prevent individuals from doing harm by removing them from the population this incapacitative function of sanctions is considered below in a model in which the amount of harm individuals cause each period that they are free is not influenced by the threat of sanctions so as to abstract from the role of sanctions as a deterrent 2 the model is initially examined assuming that an individual s dangerousness i e the harm he will do if free remains the same each period of his life and that the sanction is imprisonment in this case it is optimal to imprison an individual if his dangerousness exceeds a threshold equal to the per period social cost of imprisonment moreover if it is optimal to imprison an individual at all it will be best to do so for life the optimal probability of apprehension is also determined the model is then extended in several ways it is first supposed that the dangerousness of individuals declines with age in this case it is again optimal to imprison individuals if their dangerousness exceeds the per period cost of imprisonment but it is optimal to release them if their dangerousness later falls below the threshold it is next supposed that the dangerousness of individuals declines with time spent in prison due to a rehabilitative effect in this case it is optimal to imprison individuals beginning at a lower threshold of dangerousness than the per period cost of imprisonment imprisonment is now socially more valuable and to release them if their dangerousness becomes sufficiently low finally it is supposed that a choice can be made between imprisonment and the death penalty and the optimal choice is discussed

optimal strategies for workers on temporary layoff in this paper we analyze the worker s behavior when faced with job offers which include possible temporary layoff spells of varying known durations we show that of the three strategies which can be optimal two involve search in all or part of the layoffs we also show that the duration of any particular spell plays no role in determining which strategy is optimal to pursue and finally we develop an index for evaluating jobs with different wage and layoff probabilities and show that the worker s reservation wage monotonically increases decreases or remains constant during the course of a layoff

accomplice witnesses and organized crime theory and evidence from italy we develop an agency model of organized crime accounting for the main trade offs involved in the introduction of an accomplice witness program we characterize the optimal policy and identify its main determinants in a framework where public officials can be dishonest our predictions are tested by using data for italy before and after the introduction of the 1991 accomplice witness program as predicted by the model and the earlier antitrust literature the program appears to have strengthened deterrence and enhanced prosecution moreover consistent with a novel prediction of our theory the evidence suggests that the program efficacy is affected by the judicial system efficiency

crime punishment and the market for offenses crime is a subject of intense emotions conflicting ideologies however economists have generally explained it as a reflection of individual choice and equilibrating market forces two major themes of the literature are outlined the evolution of a market model to explain the diversity of crime across time and space and the debate about the usefulness of positive versus negative incentives systematic analyses generally indicate that crime is affected on the margin by both positive and negative incentives there are serious limitations to the effectiveness of incapacitation and rehabilitation and optimal enforcement strategies involve trade offs between narrow efficiency and equity considerations

a general equilibrium model of crime commission and prevention abstract the model developed in this paper features a general equilibrium specification of the relationships among criminals victims of crime and a law enforcement agency these relationships are employed to endogenously derive an explicit intuitively appealing technology of crime commission and prevention the solution to the present model is therefore obtained with a set of more elementary assumptions than the previous literature where arbitrary curvature assumptions are invoked

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

dynamic deterrence theory economic theories of deterrence have primarily been built on static models a common and serious shortcoming of the existing dynamic deterrence models is the assumption of a twoperiod structure that ignores recidivism the aims of this paper are to formulate and solve a general dynamic deterrence model that incorporates recidivistic behaviour to explore its implications and to derive some testable predictions the analysis shows how the value and the intensity of engaging in illegal activity change over time highlights the weaknesses of twoperiod deterrence models and compares the deterrent effectiveness of increasing the likelihood of punishment versus the severity of punishment finally the recidivistic model provides a structural foundation for the widely used stochastic process models of crime in operations research and criminology

quota mobility and quota values abstract the institutional arrangements governing quota mobility influence quota prices and the structural development of the dairy sector this article considers milk quotas in a number of oecd countries where they are applied under different conditions and with various policy goals pressure to free quota markets and to increase quota mobility is inherent in a quota system in a market economy unless very strict government rules are applied this implies that quota rights are capitalized in quota prices which increases the financial burden of new producers among others improving quota mobility by organizing quota trade or leasing will speed up structural development empirical research tends to confirm economic theory about the factors which determine quota values larger and or more efficient farms increase their share in milk production by trading or leasing

the structure of technology in brazilian sugarcane production 1975 87 an application of a modified symmetric generalized mcfadden cost function sugarcane based ethanol has become a primary automotive fuel in brazil over the past 15 years because sugarcane costs are over two thirds of the costs of ethanol production the economic efficiency of this renewable petroleum substitute hinges on the structure of technology in sugarcane production in this paper a modified symmetric generalized mcfadden sgm cost function for sugarcane is estimated and the presence of technical change and economies of scale are investigated the original sgm proposed by diewert and wales 1987 is modified to allow for fixed factors of production this allows the cost function to be applied to processes which have fixed factors the results suggest that there is no empirical evidence of economies of scale and very little technical change only in the north of brazil the implications for the future economic efficiency of this petroleum substitute are discussed