RT Article
T1 Crime, Employment and Social Welfare: An Individual-Level Study on Disadvantaged Males
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 32
IS 2
SP 159
OP 190
A1 Mesters, G.
A2 Geest, Wybrand de 1592-1661
A2 Bijleveld, C.
LA English
YR 2016
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1764275365
AB Objectives We seek evidence for economic and social mechanisms that aim to explain the relationship between employment and crime. We use the distinctive features of social welfare for identification. Methods We consider a sample of disadvantaged males from The Netherlands who are observed between ages 18 and 32 on a monthly time scale. We simultaneously model the offending, employment and social welfare variables using a dynamic discrete choice model, where we allow for state dependence, reciprocal effects and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. Results We find significant negative bi-directional structural effects between employment and property crime. Robustness checks show that only regular employment is able to significantly reduce the offending probability. Further, a significant uni-directional effect is found for the public assistance category of social welfare on property offending. Conclusion The results highlight the importance of economic incentives for explaining the relationship between employment and crime for disadvantaged individuals. For these individuals the crime reducing effects from the public assistance category of social welfare are statistically equivalent to those from employment, which suggests the importance of financial gains. Further, the results suggest that stigmatizing effects from offending severely reduce future employment probabilities.
K1 Unobserved heterogeneity
K1 Reciprocal
K1 State dependence
K1 Social Control
K1 Dynamic discrete choice
DO 10.1007/s10940-015-9258-5