ABSTRACT
The relationship between the labour market and criminal behaviour has been of longstanding interest in the social sciences. The economic analysis of this relationship started with the seminal contributions of Becker (1968) and Ehrlich (1973). The intuitive appeal of the argument that improving labour market conditions cause individuals to commit less crime is apparently so self-evident that the empirical evidence should be overwhelming. However, only in roughly the last decade have researchers been able to document reliable significant effects of various labour market conditions on crime rates. By employing novel panel data strategies Doyle et al. (1999), Raphael and Winter-Ebmer (2001), Gould et al. (2002), Papps and Winkelmann (2002), Machin and Meghir (2004), Ihlanfeldt (2007) and Lin (2008) have identified causal effects of labour market outcomes on crime rates.
