IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v29y1991i2p297-309.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Certainty vs. Severity of Punishment

Author

Listed:
  • Grogger, Jeffrey

Abstract

Recent research has generated conflicting findings regarding the role of employment and earnings versus criminal justice sanctions in reducing crime. Further disagreement exists over the relative effectiveness of increased certainty versus increased severity of punishment as deterrents to crime. This paper uses a large data set containing criminal and labor market histories of a broad sample of young male arrestees to estimate an economic model of crimes. Deterrence, incapacitation, and criminal human capital effects are measured, and the effects of employment and earnings on criminal activity are estimated. The results largely reconcile the conflicting findings from previous research. Copyright 1991 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Grogger, Jeffrey, 1991. "Certainty vs. Severity of Punishment," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 29(2), pages 297-309, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:29:y:1991:i:2:p:297-309
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:29:y:1991:i:2:p:297-309. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.