Parents, Neighbors and Youth Crime

Youth, guns, and violent crime.

Young people are overrepresented as both victims and perpetrators of violence. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that recent cohorts of youth have been composed of "superpredators" who have little regard for human life. The evidence, however, suggests that other factors are responsible for recent increases in youth gun violence. This article analyzes the extent and causes of youth violen...

Understanding and preventing youth crime (summary)

Youth Unemployment and Crime: New Lessons Exploring Longitudinal Register Data

This paper investigates the link between youth unemployment and crime using a unique combination of labor market and conviction data spanning the entire Swedish working-age population over an extended period. The empirical analysis reveals large and statistically significant effects of unemployment on several types of crime. The magnitude of the effect is similar across different subgroups of t...

A Search Model of Early Employment Careers and Youth Crime

The school to work transition and the early career path can be di cult for disadvantaged youth. Their labor market is usually studied ignoring the presence of the criminal sector, and yet a large share of them participate in crime. To study these outcomes jointly and explore how they relate, I build and estimate a two-sector search model allowing for a rich set of interactions between the two s...

Demography, Youth Fragility and Violent Crime: the Case of Brazil

PRELIMINARY. PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION Mimicking the US in 1980 and 1990s, Brazil is a remarkable case of a major shift in homicides. After increasing steadily throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, homicides reached a peak in 2003, and then fell steeply. First, I show a strong time-series co-movement between homicide rates and the percentage of the population in 15-24...