Recent years have seen a rapid expansion of economic literature on stigma, a notion that had been widely studied in sociology in relation to social deviance. Yet the economic literature overlooks the original sociological intuition that certain consequences of stigmatization could be socially indefficient. This paper formalizaes this intuition by developing a model of community behavior, which mimics a classic sociological setting concerning the rehabilitation of a former criminal offender. The conditions under which a socially inefficient equilibrium arises are derived. Some of those conditions are shown to be consistent with the findings from micro-labour studies on crime.
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Paper provided by California Irvine - School of Social Sciences in its series Papers with number
99-00-21.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General I39 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Other J70 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - General K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law