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Help Wanted: Economists, Crime and Public Policy
Open accessAbstract
Beginning with Gary W. Becker's (1968) article on crime and punishment, economists have contributed important theoretical insights and empirical findings to the study of criminal behavior but the influence of economists on crime-relevant research and over policy debates remains negligible. This essay summarizes some basic data on the causes of crime, the social costs and benefits of incarceration, and replenishing social capital. Work on crime by economists should become influential in setting research agendas and shaping policy debates but economists will have to roll up their sleeves, complexify their models, and confront a real-world ‘prisoner's dilemma’ or two.
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Citations
Cited by
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Finkelhor, D., & Jones, L. (2006) · Journal of Social Issues · doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2006.00483.x · Cited by 351
More Time, Less Crime? Estimating the Incapacitative Effect of Sentence Enhancements
Owens, E. G. (2009) · The Journal of Law and Economics · doi:10.1086/593141 · Cited by 130
The Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration: Evidence from Several Italian Collective Pardons
Barbarino, A., & Mastrobuoni, G. (2014) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy · doi:10.1257/pol.6.1.1 · Cited by 108
Metadata
- Authors
- DiIulio, J. J.
- Venue
- Journal of Economic Perspectives
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 1996-02-01
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3-24
- ISSN
- 0895-3309 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2046067615
- Cited by
- 229
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 26.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- DiIulio, J. J. (1996). Help Wanted: Economists, Crime and Public Policy. Journal of Economic Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.10.1.3
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
