This paper investigates the extent of vengeful feelings and their determinants using data on more than 116,000 individuals from 66 countries. Country characteristics as well as personal attributes of the individuals influence vengeful feelings. The magnitude of vengeful feelings is greater for people in countries with low levels of education, low-income countries, and interrupted democracies. Personal education has an impact on vengeful feelings in lower-income countries. The results suggest that some puzzles about individual choice can best be explained by considering the interplay of personal and economic factors.

This is the first study that decomposes unemployment into its structural and cyclical components and investigates their impact on income distribution, controlling for the influence of inflation. Increases in structural unemployment have a substantial aggravating impact on income inequality. Inflation has a progressive impact, which is due to the unexpected component. The study demonstrates that previous work failed to take into account the stochastic trend behavior of the variables. Consequently, specifications used by previous research cannot predict the behavior of income shares after 1983, whereas the specification used by this paper generates accurate forecasts. The results also indicate that a sustained GNP growth is not necessarily associated with an improvement in income inequality, because sustained GNP growth can coexist with increased structural unemployment. © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract This paper contributes to the debate on the impact of juvenile crime punishment on high school completion and adult recidivism using administrative data from a southern U.S. state. We exploit random assignment of cases to judges and use idiosyncratic judge stringency in imprisonment to estimate the causal effect of incarceration. We find that juvenile incarceration increases the propensity of being convicted for a drug offense in adulthood while it lowers the propensity to be convicted of a property crime. Juvenile incarceration has also a detrimental effect on high school completion for earlier cohorts, but it has no impact on later cohorts.

Abstract Recent theoretical models underscore the potential asymmetric response of various behaviors, ranging from criminal activity to smoking. In this paper, we use state-level panel and individual-level panel data to document the previously unnoticed asymmetric response of crime to changes in the unemployment rate. The results have policy implications, and they have potentially widespread ramifications because similar asymmetries may also be prevalent in other domains, ranging from the relationship between income and health to peer quality and student outcomes.

We present the first analysis of the effect of grade retention on adult criminal convictions, exploiting test cutoffs for ninth-grade promotion in Louisiana. Eighth-grade retention increases the likelihood of violent crime conviction by 1.05 percentage points (58.44%) and increases the number of violent crime convictions at first conviction. The effects are likely driven by declines in high school peer quality and reduced educational investments that result in lower noncognitive skill acquisition. Extrapolating effects away from the cutoff shows that our results are generalizable to a larger group of low-performing students and are evident for both property and drug crimes.

Being very attractive reduces a young adult's propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it. Being very attractive is also positively associated with wages and with adult vocabulary test scores, which implies that beauty may have an impact on human capital formation. The results suggest that a labor market penalty provides a direct incentive for unattractive individuals toward criminal activity. The level of beauty in high school is associated with criminal propensity seven to eight years later, which seems to be due to the impact of beauty in high school on human capital formation, although this avenue seems to be effective for females only.

This paper uses a rich employer-employee matched data set to investigate the existence and the extent of nonprofit and part-time wage and compensation differentials in child care. The empirical strategy adjusts for workers' self-selection into the for-profit or the nonprofit sector and into full-time or part-time work, as well as for unobserved worker heterogeneity, using a discrete factor model. We find differences between the regimes (full-time for-profit, full-time nonprofit, part-time for-profit, part-time nonprofit) in the manner in which human capital characteristics of the workers are rewarded. There is substantial variation in wages as a function of employee characteristics, and there is variation in wages within sectors. The results indicate that part-time jobs are good jobs in center-based child care, and there exist nonprofit wage and compensation premia, which support the property-rights hypothesis.

Since Gary S. Becker's (1968) groundbreaking work on the economics of crime, economists have expanded upon both the theory and the empirical analysis of crime (e.g., Isaac Ehrlich, 1973; M. K. Block and J. M. Heineke, 1975; Ehrlich, 1975; Ann Dryden Witte, 1980). According to the standard theoretical framework, optimizing individuals engage in criminal activities depending upon the expected payoffs of the criminal activity, the return to legal labormarket activity, tastes, and the costs of criminal activity, such as those associated with apprehension, conviction, and punishment. Excellent reviews of the literature appear in Daniel Nagin (1978), Sharon Long and Witte (1981), Richard Freeman (1983), and Theodore G. Chiricos (1987). While some studies reported evidence that increases in criminal-justice sanctions reduce criminal activity (Ehrlich, 1975; Witte, 1980; Stephen K. Layson, 1985; Jeffrey Grogger, 1991; Steven D. Levitt, 1997), others found either a weak relationship, or none at all between the two (Samuel L. Myers, Jr., 1983; James Peery Cover and Paul D. Thistle, 1988; Christopher Cornwell and William N. Trumbull, 1994). Contradictory results can be explained, at least in part, by the empirical problems inherent in crime research, the most significant being the simultaneity between crime and criminal-justice sanctions.' Thus, after 30 years of empirical research there is no consensus on the impact of police and arrests on criminal activity. The purpose of this study is to provide new, and potentially more refined, evidence on the crime-deterrence relationship using a unique data set, which consists of monthly observations in New York City for nearly 30 years. This is the only data set of its kind, based on highfrequency observations of five different crimes, the corresponding arrests, the size of the police force, and a poverty indicator, spanning decades of experience in one city.2 Consequently, this is the first paper that employs high-frequency time series of individual crime categories to circumvent many problems found in studies that employ cross-sectional or low-frequency (e.g., annual) time-series data sets. We also use recent advances in time-series econometrics to test and correct for problems that may have contaminated the results of previous time-series analyses of crime. We find robust evidence for the deterrent effects of arrests and police on most categories of serious felony offenses. Another unique feature of the study is the addition of drug-use proxies. In the 1980's and into 1990 the media focused much attention on drug abuse, crime control, and the criminaljustice system. It had been claimed that in* Corman: Department of Economics, Rider University 2083 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, and National Bureau of Economic Research; Mocan: Department of Economics, University of Colorado-Denver, Campus Box 181, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217, and National Bureau of Economic Research. This research is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to the National Bureau of Economic Research (Grant No. 1-R03-DA06764). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1996 American Economic Association Meetings in San Francisco, CA. Ofira Schwartz, Keith Amadio, Joseph Bucs, and Ronald Teodoro helped in data collection. Timothy Potter, Jennifer Giellis, Erdal Tekin, Melissa Anderson, Paul Niemann, and Danny Rees provided assistance in data analysis. John Lott, Jody Overland, and especially Michael Grossman provided very valuable suggestions. We thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Any opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and should not be assumed to be those of the granting agency, Rider University, University of ColoradoDenver, or NBER. ' Franklin Fisher and Daniel Nagin's (1978) article describing the problem is a classic in the field. Recent literature suggests several new approaches to the simultaneity problem: using careful empirical analyses of individual rather than aggregate data (Grogger, 1991; Helen Tauchen et al., 1994), and finding better exogenous instruments for identification (Levitt, 1996, 1997). 2 Among the advantages of using just one city is the fact that there is one unit defining and collecting crime and deterrence data, which prevents inconsistencies across observations.

We use data from a sample of child care centers to estimate the relationships between cost and child care quality, and between revenue and quality. We use a measure of child care quality, designed by developmental psychologists, that is positively associated with child development. Taking the estimated cost-quality and revenue-quality relationships as given, we estimate the objective functions of firms and compute the quality supply function. The results indicate that the supply of quality is moderately elastic with respect to price and the wages of child care center workers. Implications of the results for child care policy are discussed.