the returns to criminal capital human capital theory posits that individuals increase their labor market returns through investments in education and training this concept has been studied extensively across several disciplines an analog concept of criminal capital the focus of some speculation and limited empirical study remains considerably less developed theoretically and methodologically this article offers a formal theoretical model of criminal capital indicators and tests for greater illegal wage returns using a sample of serious adolescent offenders many of whom participate in illegal income generating activities our results reveal that consistent with human capital theory important illegal wage premiums are associated with investments in criminal capital notably an increasing but declining marginal return to experience and a premium for specialization furthermore as in studies of legal labor markets we find strong evidence that if left unaccounted for nonrandom sample selection causes severe bias in models of ille

an economic analysis of murder and accident risks for police in the united states the idea that us police are at great risk in their jobs is examined it is found that their risk of being murdered is actually less than for other people of the same age and sex us police are however at modestly higher risk of accidental death than are other workers a four equation model including supply demand accident risk and homicide risk is estimated and it is found that police are able to influence the accident and homicide risks they face and do affect these risks in response to salary received

royalty sharing and technology licensing in universities using data for 102 u s universities we show that royalty sharing arrangements cash flow rights vary substantially across universities and that they are largely unrelated to most observed university characteristics including faculty size quality research funding technology mix of the faculty and size of the technology licensing office however higher inventors royalty shares are associated with higher licensing income at the university controlling for other factors the results suggest that monetary incentives from inventions have real effects in the university sector jel o31 o34 l3 l01

optimal punishment schemes with state dependent preferences i introduction it is well known in the economics of crime literature that both the certainty and severity of punishment can be manipulated to deter criminal behavior as polinsky and shavell 1979 show when punishment takes the form of a fine the optimal combination of the probability of punishment and the magnitude of the fine depends on the risk attitudes of offenders and on the costs of catching and convicting offenders this paper examines how the optimal combination of certainty and severity are affected if offenders preferences are state dependent state dependent utility is commonly used in situations in which the state of the world affects how well individuals are able to enjoy the consumption of their wealth death of the individual is an obvious example and hirschleifer and riley 1992 also suggest the death of a child the loss of use of a limb or the loss of a precious heirloom there are many reasons to add conviction for a crime to this list 1 first if the individual is sent to prison his consumption opportunities are obviously diminished even without a prison sentence though utility might best be modeled as being state dependent for utility to be state independent there must exist some decrease in wealth that has the same effect on the utility function as being convicted of the crime if the offender is risk averse and has state independent utility a loss of wealth reduces the level of utility but increases marginal utility it is easy to imagine why being convicted of a crime would reduce the level of utility but it is difficult to imagine why it would increase the individual s marginal utility of wealth for example drivers who are caught speeding are angered beyond the level consistent with the expected loss of income but this additional anger does not lead to an additional increase in the marginal utility of wealth in addition to these considerations lott 1992a b provides evidence that conviction leads to increased divorce rates and constrained job opportunities the former reduces the level of utility but is unlikely to increase marginal utility and should therefore be modeled as a shift in the utility function constrained job opportunities reduce both income and job satisfaction and the reduction in job satisfaction is again best modeled as a shift in the utility function as a final argument supporting the use of state dependent preferences neilson and winter 1997 show that if offenders preferences are state dependent it is possible for them to be both risk averse and more sensitive to changes in the certainty of punishment than to proportional changes in the severity of punishment becker 1968 notes this empirical finding 2 and concludes that if offenders are expected utility maximizers they cannot be risk averse 3 polinsky and shavell 1979 demonstrate that when offenders are risk averse and have state independent utility increasing the fine increases social loss by increasing the amount of risk borne by offenders consequently in the extreme case in which it is costless to catch and convict offenders the optimal policy has a relatively low fine but punishes criminals with probability one this paper shows that if preferences are state dependent there is an additional social cost associated with setting a high probability of punishment because it makes it more likely that criminals are on their lower utility functions to avoid the additional social cost the certainty of punishment should be reduced ii the model the model presented below is identical to that in polinsky and shavell 1979 except for the addition of state dependent preferences identical individuals choose whether to commit a crime or not 4 gains from crime are random with probability q the individual gains a and with probability 1 q he gains b greater than a even though the gains are random it is assumed that the individual knows the true value of the gain before any decision must be made

using im perfect markets to catch criminals abstract we extend the use of rational choice models of criminal activity to examine the use of sting operations these operations are modeled as technological innovations in law enforcement that influence the probability of detection conviction of criminal activities we ask do all sting operations have the same impact on the supply of criminal activity we find that such impacts are sensitive to the type of sting used and the competitiveness of the criminal market in which the sting is used

the effects of university rules on spinoff creation the case of academia in italy the economics literature provides rich evidence on the convergence between the institutional factors and individual level characteristics influencing the involvement of academia in knowledge transfer activities and spinoff creation however little is known about the effects of internal university regulations on academic entrepreneurship in the last ten years spinoff activity from academia in italy has been intensive and most academic institutions have policies related to the regulation of academic entrepreneurship practices known as regolamento spinoff this paper investigates the impact of the set of university rules governing the creation of spinoffs on institutional capability to generate new ventures based on panel data analysis using detailed university level data on academic spinoffs we identify three classes of institutionally defined rules that can motivate faculty members to establish a spinoff company these are general rules and procedures rules regulating monetary incentives rules related to the entrepreneurial risk we find that at least some rules pertaining to each of these three classes have some effect on spinoff creation in particular we find that monetary incentives play a significant role in promoting academic spinoff activity and that overly restrictive university rules regarding contract research have a negative effect on spinoff creation

a dynamic model of investment in the u s beef cattle industry reproduction constraints lead to some a priori information that may prove valuable in econo metrically modeling inventory dynamics within the u s cattle herd the distributed lag models estimated for animal inventories suggest an implicit incorporation of the age distribution of the herd that is crucial to understanding the retention culling investment decisions the estimated equations are validated using post sample observations that were withheld prior to estimation the final form dynamic equations have complex roots and protracted price and investment effects the parameter estimates are used to calculate intermediate and long run elasticities at the means of relevant variables

effects of enforcement on illegal markets evidence from migrant smuggling along the southwestern border abstract the paper analyzes the effects of tighter border control on the illegal crossing market between mexico and the united states combining panel data on illegal migrants with enforcement statistics the effects of enforcement are found to be moderate prices of border smugglers coyotes increased by only 17 while the demand for smugglers has remained unchanged enforcement has however shifted illegal migrants to remote crossing places border crossing is now more time intensive with higher prices for coyotes and risk of death this geographic substitution raised migration costs by 140 more than twice the effect of enforcement on smuggling prices

inequality and crime this paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties the behavior of property and violent crime are quite different inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime with an elasticity above 0 5 by contrast poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime but little on violent crime property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories

university start up formation and technology licensing with firms that go public a resource based view of academic entrepreneurship abstract although academic entrepreneurship is a topic receiving some attention in the literature higher education s appetite for expanding technology transfer activities suggests that more research is needed to inform practice this study investigates the effects of particular resource sets on two university commercialization activities the number of start up companies formed and the number of initial public offering ipo firms to which a university had previously licensed a technology utilizing multisource data on 120 universities and a resource based view of the firm framework a set of university financial human capital and organizational resources were found to be significant predictors of one or both outcomes

property crime investigating career patterns and earnings abstract i investigate self reported theft data in the nlsy 1997 cohort for the years 1997 2011 several striking patterns emerge first individuals appear to be active thieves for extremely short periods in most cases in only one year and fewer than 5 of thieves for more than three years out of the 15 years of data second self reported earnings from theft are generally very low and there is little evidence of successful criminals or consistent earnings from theft third measures that proxy impatience smoking for example are highly correlated with theft fourthly thieves and non thieves have similar earnings during the years of peak theft activity but thieves have lower earnings in their late 20s after most have long since stopped committing theft attrition of survey respondents underreporting and incapacitation effects do not appear to explain this there may be professional thieves too rare to show up in even large samples such as the nlsy theft in the united states thus appears to be substantially a phenomenon of individuals entering a temporary period of intensified risk taking in adolescence

short run supply responses in the u s beef cattle industry this article investigates the response of beef cattle producers to changes in the price of cattle previous research has suggested that there may be a negative short run supply response to a permanent increase in the price of cattle we build a dynamic rational expectations model that separates the markets for fed and unfed beef this separation generates predictions that the supply response is generally positive even for permanent shocks in the short run and nests the negative supply response as a special case for appropriately restricted demand shocks

do state minimum wages affect the incarceration rate because of historically unprecedented increases in the prison population since the late 1970s the united states has the highest incarceration rate in the world using becker s 1968 framework on crime this study investigates the causal relationship between incarceration rates and state minimum wages our identification strategy consists of a state level fixed effects model and autor and dorn s 2013 two stage least squares 2sls approach using the historical local industry structure we predict the change in employment shares of manual task intensive occupations and use those as an instrument for state minimum wages the fixed effects and 2sls estimates suggest that a one dollar increase in state minimum wage leads to approximately 12 25 fewer incarcerations per 100 000 state residents estimates of the heterogeneous impacts by race and gender indicate that the aggregate impact of state minimum wages is entirely driven by men

identifying the effect of unemployment on crime abstract in this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and crime using u s state data we estimate the effect of unemployment on the rates of seven felony offenses we control extensively for state level demographic and economic factors and estimate specifications that include state specific time trends state effects and year effects in addition we use prime defense contracts and a state specific measure of exposure to oil shocks as instruments for unemployment rates we find significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime rates that are stable across model specifications our estimates suggest that a substantial portion of the decline in property crime rates during the 1990s is attributable to the decline in the unemployment rate the evidence for violent crime is considerably weaker however a closer analysis of the violent crime of rape yields some evidence that the employment prospects of males are weakly related to state rape rates

micro economic models of beef supply a series of micro economic models of cow calf and feedlot operators is developed in an effort to isolate factors important in beef supply slight changes in behavioural assumptions are shown to imply qualitatively different comparative static reactions on the part of these cattlemen some empirical examples of the feedlot operator are presented based upon an estimated weight gain function modeles microeconomiques d offre de boeuf l auteur developpe une serie de modeles microeconomiques du comportement des producteurs de veaux et des engraisseurs de betail afin d identifier les facteurs les plus importants dans la definition de l offre de boeuf des variations minimes dans le comportement presume se traduisent par des reactions qualitativement differentes des producteurs de betail en statique comparative on presente quelques exemples empiriques du comportement de l engraisseur a partir d une fonction calibree de gains de poids

resources capabilities risk capital and the creation of university spin out companies abstract the commercialization of university research has become an increasingly important issue given concerns regarding licensing and the university s desire to maximize the returns to intellectual property ip in this paper we assess the impact of university resources and routines capabilities on the creation of spin out companies we find that both the number of spin out companies created and the number of spin out companies created with equity investment are significantly positively associated with expenditure on intellectual property protection the business development capabilities of technology transfer offices and the royalty regime of the university these results highlight the importance not just of resource stocks but also of developing appropriate capabilities of technology transfer officers in spinning out companies the results suggest that universities and policy makers need to devote attention to the training and recruitment of technology officers with the broad base of commercial skills

an econometric model of cattle inventories dynamic regression equations are estimated for each beef cattle breeding herd and beef cattle inventories at two levels of aggregation the u s and montana the analysis for montana was utilized as a guide for specification of the national equation to reduce the inference problem associated with letting the sample data help specify the model rational lags on average price received by farmers for calves and the ratio of fed beef to corn prices at omaha constitute the primary explanatory variables the equations perform exceedingly well over the sample period 1950 80 and in post sample forecasts with the sample truncated back to 1970

does government funding complement or substitute private research funding to universities abstract there is growing political pressure on universities to intensify their interaction with industry and to enlarge their own research funding options in a context characterised by increasing constraints on public spending however whether the successful achievement of such a political desired outcome is consistent with a restriction of government funding is not clear and requires further investigation as a matter of fact there is scant empirical evidence on whether and to what extent government funding affects the external funding options available to universities in particular those related to research and consulting activities by using a set of probit and tobit panel data models estimated on financial data for the whole population of italian university departments engaged in research in the engineering and physical sciences this paper provides evidence that government funding to universities complements funding from research contracts and consulting contributing to increasing universities collaboration with industry and activating knowledge transfer processes

institutional determinants of university spin off quantity and quality a longitudinal multilevel cross country study the creation of spin off firms from universities is seen as an important mechanism for the commercialization of research and hence the overall contribution from universities to technological development and economic growth governments and universities are seeking to develop framework conditions that are conductive to spin off creation the most prevalent of such initiatives are legislative changes at national level and the establishment of technology transfer offices at university level the effectiveness of such initiatives is debated but empirical evidence is limited in this paper we analyze the full population of universities in italy norway and the uk three countries adopting differing approaches to framework conditions to test whether national and university level initiatives have an influence on the number of spin offs created and the quality of these spin offs building on institutional theory and using multilevel analysis we find that changes in the institutional framework conditions at both national and university levels are conductive to the creation of more spin offs but that the increase in quantity is at the expense of the quality of these firms hence the effect of such top down changes in framework conditions on the economic impact from universities seems to be more symbolic than substantive

crime and economic incentives we explore the role that economic incentives particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution play in determining crime rates we use data on the police force areas of england and wales between 1975 and 1996 and find relative falls in the wages of low wage workers lead to increases in crime we carry out a number of experiments with different wage measures including a wage measure that accounts for the effects of changes in the composition of employment these reinforce the picture of a strong association between the low wage labor market and crime the result that incentives play a central role is reinforced further by the strong impact on crime of deterrence measures and of a measure of the returns to crime

the changing returns to crime do criminals respond to prices to what extent does crime follow the pattern of potential gains to illegal activity this article presents evidence on how criminals respond to this key incentive by reporting crime price elasticities estimated from a comprehensive crime dataset containing detailed information on stolen items for london between 2002 and 2012 evidence of significant positive crime price elasticities are shown for a panel of 44 consumer goods and for commodity related goods jewellery fuel and metal crimes the reported evidence indicates that potential gains are a major empirical driver of criminal activity and a crucial part of the economic model of crime the changing structure of goods prices helps to explain over 10 15 of the observed fall in property crime across all goods categories and the majority of the sharp increases in the commodity related goods observed between 2002 and 2012

the risks and rewards of criminal activity a comprehensive test of criminal deterrence whereas previous analyses of criminal deterrence have focused on the effect of criminal enforcement on crime rates this study analyzes the existence of compensating differentials for criminal pursuits by analyzing the risk rewards trade off this approach represents a more comprehensive test of the criminal deterrence hypothesis the sample consisted of black inner city youths who reported their crime participation crime income and self assessed risks from crime the risk premiums for the three principal adverse outcomes arrest conviction and prison constituted between one half and two thirds of all crime income on the average providing strong support for the criminal deterrence hypothesis

on information and market dynamics the case of the u s beef market abstract the paper investigates the nature of dynamic prices and expectations in a competitive market the approach is applied to the u s beef market which exhibits cyclical patterns and significant biological lags in the production process beef price equations are estimated under different expectation regimes the empirical results indicate the presence of heterogeneous price expectations with a significant number of market participants neglecting information about the existence of a beef cycle

international comparisons of cattle cycles the time series properties of cattle production in three countries with different technologies argentina the united states and uruguay are studied in order to shed light on the role of technology in the dynamics of the cattle sector four series are analyzed for each country slaughter price stock of cows and total herd spectral decomposition of the time series shows the existence of cycles having surprising regularity for all the four time series the three countries exhibit very similar cyclicities in spite of their different technologies and economic environment

optimising criminal behaviour and the disutility of prison we use rich microdata on bank robberies to estimate individual level disutilitiesities of imprisonment the identification rests on the money versus apprehension trade off that robbers face inside the bank when deciding whether to leave or collect money for an additional minute the distribution of the disutility of prison is not degenerate generating heterogeneity in behaviour our results show that unobserved heterogeneity in robber ability is important for explaining outcomes in terms of haul and arrest furthermore higher ability robbers are found to have larger disutilities suggesting that increased sentence lengths might effectively target these more harmful criminals

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

estimations of the economic model of crime using aggregate and individual level data much has happened in the economics of crime since becker s 1 seminal paper of two decades ago the theory has been refined by among others ehrlich 10 11 12 block and lind 4 5 block and heinke 3 and schmidt and witte 30 attempts to test the model empirically began immediately the most cited including ehrlich 10 11 12 sjoquist 31 carr hill and stern 7 phillips and votey 26 witte 38 and myers 22 23 interest continues with recent work including layson 19 sandelin and skogh 29 ehrlich and brower 13 cover and thistle 9 viscusi 36 and tauchen witte and griesinger 33 there has been some controversy however concerning the type of data more suitable to the estimation of the economic model of crime most of the work has used aggregate data in which the unit of observation is a political jurisdiction but the use of aggregate data has been sharply criticized the alternative is individual data few attempts have been made to use individual data probably because an ideally constructed data set representative of a general population would be far too costly for most research budgets most of the studies that have been done have used data on releasees from prison or other criminal justice programs they are in effect recidivism studies based on the economic model of crime

entrepreneurial orientation technology transfer and spinoff performance of u s universities this paper adopts a resource based perspective to understand why some universities are more successful than others at generating technology based spinoff companies in this respect we derive eight hypotheses that link attributes of resources and capabilities institutional financial commercial and human capital to university spinoff outcomes using panel data from 1980 to 2001 our econometric estimators reveal evidence of history dependence for successful technology transfer to occur although faculty quality size and orientation of science and engineering funding and commercial capability were also found to be predictors of university spinoff activity we conclude by drawing implications for policy makers and university heads