Does Growing Up in a High Crime Neighborhood Affect Youth Criminal Behavior?
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper investigates the effect of early exposure to neighborhood crime on subsequent criminal behavior of youth exploiting a unique natural experiment between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to neighborhoods quasi-randomly. We find strong evidence that the share of young people convicted for crimes, in particular violent crimes, in the neighborhood increases convictions of male assignees later in life. No such effects are found for other measures of neighborhood crime including the rate of committed crimes. Our findings suggest social interaction as a key channel through which neighborhood crime is linked to individual criminal behavior.
منابع مشابه
Gender and Crime: An Empirical Test of General Strain Theory among Youth in Babol (A City in Northern Part of Iran)
This paper presents an attempt to use Agnew’s General Strain Theory ( GST) (1992) for explanation of the criminal behavior differences between young males and females in Babol, a city in northern part of Iran. General Strain Theory (GST) is essentially regarded as a set of ideas formulated to explain the occurrence of crime as a result of the strain in social life. This study explores th...
متن کاملYouth Depression and Future Criminal Behavior
Youth Depression and Future Criminal Behavior While the contemporaneous association between mental health problems and criminal behavior has been explored in the literature, the long-term consequences of such problems, depression in particular, have received much less attention. In this paper, we examine the effect of depression during adolescence on the probability of engaging in a number of c...
متن کاملExamining the Divergence Across Self-report and Official Data Sources on Inferences About the Adolescent Life-course of Crime
Both self-report and official crime data have known limitations, leading to the critical question as to whether inferences about the adolescent life-course of crime are different across these data sources. Using both official and self-report arrest data on a sample of subjects drawn from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) longitudinal cohort study, this paper exam...
متن کاملA Theoretical and Empirical Study of Individual Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System
This paper examines perceptions of the criminal justice system held by young males using longitudinal survey data from the recent National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort and the National Youth Survey. First, a model is developed to study how perceptions respond to individual information about the probability of arrest and how perceptions a ect criminal behavior. Then, the model is sho...
متن کاملThe Effect of Growing Up in a High Crime Area on Criminal Behaviour: Evidence from a Random Allocation Experiment
This paper addresses the question whether the share of criminal youths in the neighbourhood where individuals grow up affect their probability to become engaged in criminal activity later in life. We address the problem of sorting by making use of a natural experiment where individuals were randomly allocated across spatial areas, carried out between 1986 and 1998 for refugee immigrants to Denm...
متن کامل