Existing studies of the impact of conviction on income and employment do not consider life cycle issues. We postulate that conviction reduces access to career jobs offering stable, long-term employment. Instead, conviction relegates offenders to spot market jobs, which may have higher pay at the outset of the career but do not offer stable employment or rapidly rising wages. Thus, first-time conviction may increase the wages of young workers while decreasing the wages of older workers. We test our theory with data on federal offenders and find that first-time conviction has a positive and significant effect on income for offenders under age 25 and an increasingly negative and significant impact for offenders over age 30. These results imply that the present value of income lost as a result of conviction varies over the life cycle, reaching a maximum in the middle of the career. We find that the gains sought by these offenders follow similar profiles, suggesting that prospective offenders are deterred by the possibility of lost future income. Because the discounted loss in future income facing young offenders may be small, our results may provide part of an explanation of youth crime.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
4551.
Length: Date of creation: Nov 1993 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4551
Note: LE Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Find related papers by JEL classification: K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)