EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does Wealth Inhibit Criminal Behavior? Evidence from Swedish Lottery Winners and Their Children

David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and Christofer Schroeder

No 31962, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: There is a well-established negative gradient between economic status and crime, but its underlying causal mechanisms are not well understood. We use data on four Swedish lotteries matched to data on criminal convictions to gauge the causal effect of financial windfalls on player’s own crime and their children’s delinquency. We estimate a positive but statistically insignificant effect of lottery wealth on players’ own conviction risk. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects one fifth as large as the cross-sectional gradient between income and crime. We also estimate a less precise null effect of parental lottery wealth on child delinquency.

JEL-codes: K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-law and nep-ure
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31962.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Wealth Inhibit Criminal Behavior? Evidence from Swedish Lottery Winners and Their Children (2023) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:31962

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31962