Over last two decades punitiveness of juvenile justice system has declined substantially relative adult courts. During that same time period juvenile violent rates have grown almost twice as quickly as adult crime rates. This paper examines degree to which those two empirical observations are related, finding that changes in relative punishments can account for 60 percent of differential growth rates in juvenile and adult violent between 1978 and 1993. Juvenile offenders appear be at least as responsive sanctions as adults. Moreover, sharp changes in criminal involvement with transition from juvenile adult court suggest that deterrence, rather than simply incapacitation important role. There does not, however, appear be a strong relationship between the punitiveness of juvenile justice system that a cohort faces and extent of involvement for that cohort later in life.

Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. This paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes. Estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies. Campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. "High-quality" challengers are likely to receive a high fraction of the vote and have high campaign expenditures, even if campaign spending has no impact on election outcomes. To avoid that bias, this paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes. Estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies. Campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending. Campaign spending limits appear socially desirable, but public financing of campaigns does not.

We are grateful to Foote and Goetz for noting that the final table of Donohue and Levitt (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116 (2001), 379–420) inadvertently omitted state-year interactions. Correcting our mistake does not alter the sign or statistical significance of our estimates, although it does reduce their magnitude. Using a more carefully constructed measure of abortion that better links birth cohorts to abortion exposure (by using abortion data by state of residence rather than of occurrence, by adjusting for cross-state mobility, and by more precisely estimating birth years from age of arrest data), we present new evidence that abortion legalization reduces crime through both a cohort-size and a selection effect.

Street gangs have a long history in American cities (Thrasher 1927). Until recently, gangs were organized primarily as social peer groups. Any economic activities were of secondary importance (Suttles 1968, Klein 1995). The last two decades, however, have given rise to a dramatic transformation in street gangs, or what Taylor (1990) terms their "corporatization."

An Examination of the Influence of Theory and Individual Theorists on Empirical Research in Microeconomics by Pierre-André Chiappori and Steven D. Levitt. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 151-155 of American Economic Review, May 2003

Growing Up in the Projects: The Economic Lives of a Cohort of Men Who Came of Age in Chicago Public Housing by Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Published in volume 91, issue 2, pages 79-84 of American Economic Review, May 2001

In economics, the standard mechanism for allocating scarce resources is the market. A smoothly functioning market, however, is built upon legally enforceable contracts and property rights. In the absence of law, it is likely that violence (or the threat thereof), rather than prices, is the means by which resources will be allocated. Interactions among animals provide clear evidence for this claim. Dominance hierarchies based on fighting ability, also sometimes known as pecking orders, have been documented across a wide variety of species (e.g., primates, chickens and other birds, reptiles, lobsters) and a broad range of resources including food, nesting sites, and access to mates (Warder C. Allee, 1938; John Alcock, 1993). Evidence suggests that violence also plays a critical role in human interactions when property rights are not legally enforceable (e.g., drug dealing and extortion) (see e.g., Peter Reuter, 1983; Geoffrey Canada, 1995). In this paper, we analyze the determinants of the efficiency with which illegal markets allocate scarce resources. We develop a stylized model in which players compete for a fixed prize, with the winner determined by fighting ability. Efficiency in this context is determined by the amount of resources spent on fighting. Two factors affecting efficiency emerge from the model: lethality and predictability. Perhaps surprisingly, the use of more lethal mechanisms for resolving disputes does not have a clear impact on the social costs of violence. The intuition underlying this result is that, as the costs of losing a fight rise, the willingness to fight falls. We show that holding other factors constant, the resources spent on fighting are lowest when the cost of losing is either very low or very high (e.g., nuclear deterrence), but over a wide range of lethality levels, the overall social costs of fighting are fairly stable. In contrast, the costs of violence are critically linked to the predictability of dispute outcomes (i.e. the certainty with which potential combatants know who will be victorious ex ante). When the outcome of a conflict is highly correlated with observable characteristics such as strength or size, there is little need to actually fight. Thus unpredictability, all else equal, increases the expected payoff to fighting for the lower-ranked member, leading to more conflicts.