Juvenile Delinquency and Conformism

Yves Zenou and Eleonora Patacchini

No 7565, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks. A novel social network-based empirical strategy allows us to identify peer effects for different types of crimes. We find that conformity plays an important role for all crimes, especially for petty crimes. This suggests that, for juvenile crime, an effective policy should not only be measured by the possible crime reduction it implies but also by the group interactions it engenders.

Keywords: Linear-in-means model; Social Networks; Social norms; Spatial autoregressive model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 C21 D85 K42 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Juvenile Delinquency and Conformism (2012)
Working Paper: Juvenile Delinquency and Conformism (2010)
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