Premium
CRIME AND EDUCATION IN A MODEL OF INFORMATION TRANSMISSION
Author(s) -
CORTÉS Darwin,
FRIEBEL Guido,
MALDONADO Darío
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
annals of public and cooperative economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.526
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-8292
pISSN - 1370-4788
DOI - 10.1111/apce.12254
Subject(s) - vulnerability (computing) , drop out , information transmission , profitability index , human capital , crime prevention , criminology , psychology , social psychology , sociology , economics , demographic economics , computer security , economic growth , computer science , computer network , finance
We model the decisions of young individuals to stay in school or drop out and engage in criminal activities. We build on the literature on human capital and crime engagement and use the framework of Banerjee (1993) that assumes that the information needed to engage in crime arrives in the form of a rumour and that individuals update their beliefs about the profitability of crime relative to education. These assumptions allow us to study the effect of social interactions on crime. In our model, we investigate informational spillovers from the actions of talented students to less talented students. We show that policies that decrease the cost of education for talented students may increase the vulnerability of less talented students to crime. The effect is exacerbated when students do not fully understand the underlying learning dynamics.