Youth Unemployment and Crime: New Lessons Exploring Longitudinal Register Data

Hans Grönqvist

No 7/2011, Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: This paper investigates the link between youth unemployment and crime using a unique combination of labor market and conviction data spanning the entire Swedish working-age population over an extended period. The empirical analysis reveals large and statistically significant effects of unemployment on several types of crime. The magnitude of the effect is similar across different subgroups of the population. In contrast to most previous studies, the results suggest that joblessness explain a meaningful portion of why male youths are overrepresented among criminal offenders. I discuss reasons for the discrepancy in the results and show that that the use of aggregated measures of labor market opportunities in past studies is likely to capture offsetting general equilibrium effects. Contrary to predictions by economic theory the effect of unemployment on crime is not mediated by income. Instead, an analysis of crimes committed during weekdays versus weekends provides suggestive evidence that unemployment increases the time that individuals have to engage in crime.

Keywords: Unemployment; Delinquency; Age-crime profile (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J62 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2011-03-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-law, nep-ltv and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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