Can racially unbiased police perpetuate long-run discrimination?

We develop a stylized dynamic model of highway policing in which a non-racist police officer exhibits a cognitive bias: relative overconfidence. The officer is given incentives to arrest criminals but faces a per stop cost that increases when the racial mix of her stops differs from that of the population. By observing the racial composition of jail inmates, she estimates crime rates of each race. Her overconfidence regarding eventual incarceration of criminals is shown to lead her to overestimate the crime rate of one race causing the long-run racial composition of the jail population to deviate from the “fair” one.     

高低级别公职人员经济犯罪隐蔽性比较研究

在实地调研了2008-2010年430个公职人员经济犯罪案例的基础上,将其分为两类,即高级别和低级别不法公职人员经济犯罪。统计分析发现,高级别比低级别更加隐蔽。通过有序逻辑回归模型分析发现:影响高级别公职人员经济犯罪隐蔽性的主要是潜伏期、犯罪次数、所得来源种类等经济犯罪因素;影响低级别公职人员经济犯罪隐蔽性的主要是年龄、教育程度、家庭状况等个人因素;犯罪总金额则是影响高级别和低级别两者的共同因素。     

Crime,apprehension and clearance rates: Panel data evidence from Canadian provinces

The Becker model of crime establishes the importance of the probability of apprehension as a key factor in a rational individual's decision to commit a crime. In this respect, most empirical studies based on US data have relied on variation in the number of police officers to estimate the impact of the probability of apprehension or capture. We measure the probability of apprehension by clearance rates and study their effects on crime rates, employing a panel of Canadian provinces from 1986 to 2005. OLS, GMM, GLS and IV estimates yield statistically significant elasticities of clearance rates, ranging from ?0.2 to ?0.4 for violent crimes and from ?0.5 to ?0.6 for property crimes. These findings reflect the importance of police force crime‐solving productivity.     

Crime,punishment, and prejudice

We examine the link between the penalties used to punish convicted criminals and judicial prejudice against defendants. In our model, agents choose to commit crimes if their privately observed utility from doing so is high enough. A crime generates noisy evidence, and defendants are convicted when the realized amount of evidence is sufficiently strong to establish the probability of guilt beyond a fixed threshold. We show that if convicted offenders are incarcerated, poorer individuals face a strong prior prejudice in trials and are therefore convicted with less evidence than richer individuals. At the same time, they commit crimes more frequently. Penalties such as monetary fines can eliminate this bias, but may also reverse it. We fully characterize the penalty schedule that guarantees an unbiased equilbrium. We extend the model such that agents also differ in characteristics such as race or gender. We show biased outcomes (targeted at subgroups of the population) may still exist, even if all members of the population are ex-ante alike in their economic characteristics.     

The limit of oversight in policing: Evidence from the 2001 Cincinnati riot

Oversight in policing involves investigating officers for complaints against them and punishing them if found guilty. Officers commit errors in policing and, since reducing the error rate is costly, they cut down policing to avoid complaints. This paper tests the hypothesis that oversight reduces policing by exploiting a quasi-experiment: In April 2001, a riot erupted in Cincinnati after a white officer shot dead an unarmed African-American adolescent; the sharply increased media attention, a Justice Department investigation, together with a “racial profiling” lawsuit, exogenously raised the expected penalty of an officer's errors. Compared with the period from January 1999 to March 2001, arrests during the remaining months of 2001 fell substantially. The decline was more significant for offenses where the error rate was higher. Communities with a greater percentage of African-Americans experienced greater arrest reductions. Felony crime surged during the same period.     

高低级别公职人员经济犯罪行为决策差异分析

公职人员经济犯罪决策受到需求动机、"进入"成本、道德自律三个条件约束。在引入公职人员效用函数的基础上,得出影响公职人员经济犯罪决策的因素是效用偏好结构、既有效用量、相对效用量、犯罪金额。研究结果表明:个人效用偏好结构不同导致高低级别公职人员经济犯罪决策的差异;就财富指标而言,高级别比低级别公职人员经济犯罪倾向性小,但一旦高级别公职人员发生经济犯罪,其犯罪金额较大;就相对效用指标而言,高级别比低级别公职人员经济犯罪倾向性大。     

CRIMINAL PERCEPTIONS AND VIOLENT CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION

This paper explores the relationship between various measures of prior victimization and indicators of both the perceived victimization risk and fear of crime. Equations are specified and estimated both for the fear of crime/perception of risk and for prior victimization. Since prior victimizations are exogenous to the determination of the current assessment of risk or fear of crime, it is possible to isolate the independent effects of victimization and extraneous factors, like racial neighborhood composition, in a recursive model structure. The analysis also examines the contribution that individual victimization and extraneous factors make to the overall gap between average victimization rates and average indicators of fear.
Prior victimization explains some of the rather enormous perception of future victimization, but a sizable gap between perceived risk and actual risk remains. Much of that gap appears to be related to proximity to nonwhites, a possible proxy for racial prejudices and beliefs that nonwhite neighborhoods contribute to heightened crime.     

CASINOS,HOTELS, AND CRIME

This paper examines the links among casinos, hotels, and crime using Indiana's counties for 1994‐2004. In estimating casinos' impacts, I introduce a measure of casino activity in addition to variables related to the timing of casino opening. I test whether or not the number of hotel rooms affects crime rates. Increased casino activity reduces crime rates except for burglary, where crime rates rise after a lag. Leaving out a measure of casino activity appears to create a serious specification error. Finally, including problem crime data plagued by incomplete reporting affects the estimated impact of casinos on crime. (JEL R11, L83)     

Examining the link between crime and unemployment: a time-series analysis for Canada

We use national and regional Canadian data to analyse the relationship between economic activity (as reflected by the unemployment rate) and crime rates. Given potential aggregation bias, we disaggregate the crime data and look at the relationship between six different types of crimes rates and unemployment rate; we also disaggregate the data by region. We employ an error correction model in our analysis to test for short-run and long-run dynamics. We find no evidence of long-run relationship between crime and unemployment, when we look at both disaggregation by type of crime and disaggregation by region. Lack of evidence of a long-run relationship indicates we have no evidence of the motivation hypothesis. For selected types of property crimes, we find some evidence of a significant negative short-run relationship between crime and unemployment, lending support to the opportunity hypothesis. Inclusion of control variables in the panel analysis does not alter the findings, qualitatively or quantitatively.     

Fields of Study and the Earnings Gap by Race in Brazil

Workers with tertiary education in Brazil earn three times more than those with a lower level of schooling. Thus, the attainment of a bachelor's or graduate degree by a black worker usually provides important benefits at the individual level. However, an educational improvement of this type does not assure equal labor market outcomes relative to white workers with the same level of education. The labor earnings differential by race in Brazil is high even among individuals who completed at least a bachelor's degree. This paper investigates this labor earnings gap, emphasizing the unequal distribution of whites and blacks across fields of study. Evidence indicates that disparities in the distribution of racial groups across fields of study help explain 18% of the total median earnings differential in 2000 and 33% in 2010, accounting for most of the gap between white and black workers due to characteristic effects in this latter period.     

Crime and local inequality in South Africa

We examine the effects of local inequality on property and violent crime in South Africa. The findings are consistent with economic theories relating local inequality to property crime and also with sociological theories that imply that inequality leads to crime in general. Burglary rates are 25–43% higher in police precincts that are the wealthiest among their neighbors, suggesting that criminals travel to neighborhoods where the expected returns from burglary are highest. Finally, while we find little evidence that inequality between racial groups fosters interpersonal conflict at the local level, racial heterogeneity itself is highly correlated with crime.     

COPS and crime

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 established the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program that provided grants to states and localities to pay up to 75% of the cost for new police hires for 3 years. To date, the COPS program has awarded almost $5 billion in hiring grants paying for 64,000 new police officers. We use annual data from 1990 through 2001 from 2074 cities with populations in excess of 10,000 to show that for each officer paid for by grant funds, the size of the force expands by 0.70 officers. The size of COPS grants are correlated with population and crime rates, but not the pre-COPS time trends in crime rates or the size of the police force. This allows us to use the size of COPS grants as an instrument for the size of the police force in regressions where crime is the outcome of interest. These models indicate that police added to the force by COPS generated statistically significant reductions in auto thefts, burglaries, robberies, and aggravated assaults.     

未成年犯罪嫌疑人适用逮捕问题研究

未成年人犯罪已被全世界列为继吸毒贩毒和环境污染之后的第三大社会公害。从全国检察机关的统计数据看,未成年人犯罪案件的数量和比例呈逐年上升趋势,未成年人犯罪案件的不断增多已成为令人担忧的重大社会问题。青少年是祖国的未来,同时也是祖国的希望,因而很有必要对未成年人犯罪问题进行调查,探究其违法犯罪的原因,建立一套科学合理的刑事逮捕措施,以求帮助未成年犯罪人员矫正犯罪,重新改造自我。     

Self-serving dictators and economic growth

We study the effect of fair institutions on growth. In our model, individuals are endowed with unequal entitlements to the economy's output. They can free-ride or cooperate. Cooperation is individually costly, but increases aggregate output and growth. Experimentally, we observe significantly less cooperation, when dictators chose high instead of low inequality. This effect is not observed when the degree of inequality is chosen randomly. Simple cross-country regressions provide basic macroeconomic support for interaction effects between the degree and the genesis of inequality. We conclude that economies granting equal opportunities are less likely to suffer retarded growth due to free-riding than economies with self-serving dictators.     

Institutional Dynamics on the U.S. Court of Appeals: Minority Representation Under Panel Decision Making

This article assesses how the institutional context of decisionmaking on three-judge panels of the federal Court of Appealsaffects the impact that gender and race have on judicial decisions.Our central question is whether and how racial minority andwomen judges influence legal policy on issues thought to beof particular concern to women and minorities when serving onappellate panels which decide cases by majority rule. Properanalysis of this question requires investigating whether womenand minority judges influence the decisions of other panel members.We find that the norm of unanimity on panels grants women influenceover outcomes even when they are outnumbered on a panel.     

The legacy of slavery on hate crime in the United States

Does slavery play a role in explaining why some areas are more prone to hate crimes? Using county-level data on slavery in 1860, I find evidence that U.S. counties with a higher share of slaves in the population more than 150 years ago are more likely to observe hate crime incidents today. One percentage point increase in the share of slaves in the population in 1860 is associated with 0.018 more hate crime incidents per 100,000 population directed at blacks today. Additionally, there is evidence that slavery is associated with more hate crime incidents directed towards Jews and LGBT population. This result supports previous studies which find persistence in cultural norms and racial attitudes.     

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE DECLINE IN CRIME?*

In this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the United States. We propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: First, the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996. Second, the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability, the stronger economy, and the aging of the population. Third, the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible. Fourth, the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime. Overall, our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century.     

Racial stereotypes and robbery

Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial disparities. African-Americans are more likely to be victims, arrestees and prisoners than are members of other demographic groups, and while black-on-white robberies are very common, white-on-black robberies are extremely rare. The disparities for robbery are also much greater than those for other crimes of acquisition. We develop a model of robbery that attempts to address these and other stylized facts. Robberies are typically interactions between strangers that involve a sequence of rapid decisions with severely limited information. Potential offenders must assess the likelihood of victim resistance, and victims must assess the likelihood that resistance will be met with violence. Racial disparities in the distribution of income can cause such probability assessments to be race-contingent, affecting crime rates as well as rates of resistance and violence. We argue that this model helps account for several empirical regularities that appear puzzling from the perspective of alternative theories of crime.     

Why Has the Workplace Become Safer?

This paper asks whether the fall over 1983–1993 in the aggregate injury-to-workforce ratio (the injury rate) that occurred in Queensland was due to improvements in industrial safety or due to shifts in employment away from 'unsafe' industries. The conclusion, based on data from the Queensland Employee Injury Data Base, is that improvements in industrial safety were the main reason for the State's workplace becoming safer. The paper then conducts an econometric investigation in to why industrial injury rates in Queensland fell over 1983–1993. The evidence is that in Mining, Manufacturing and Construction, there was a significant autonomous decrease in the injury rate. The problem is that since the data available were only for those injuries against which compensation was claimed, it is difficult to say—except as a matter of judgement—whether improvements in injury rates in these sectors were due to genuine improvements in safety or caused by a fall in the propensity to claim compensation. Changes in general economic conditions—particularly, rising unemployment—have also contributed to falling injury rates.