Reexamining Criminal Behavior: The Importance of Omitted Variable Bias

David Mustard ()

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2003, vol. 85, issue 1, 205-211

Abstract: Recently many papers have used the arrest rate to measure punishments in crime-rate regressions. However, arrest rates account for only a portion of the criminal sanction. Conviction rates and time served are theoretically important, but rarely used, and excluding them generates omitted variable bias if they are correlated with the arrest rate. This paper uses the most complete set of conviction and sentencing data to show that arrest rates are negatively correlated with these normally excluded variables. Consequently, previous estimates of arrest-rate effects are understated by as much as 50%. Also, conviction rates, but not sentence lengths, have significant explanatory power in standard crime-rate regressions. © 2003 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.2003.85.1.205 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:85:y:2003:i:1:p:205-211

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().