IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fem/femwpa/2010.129.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Crime and Education in a Model of Information Transmission

Author

Listed:
  • Darwin Cortés

    (Universidad del Rosario)

  • Guido Friebel

    (Goethe-Universität)

  • Darío Maldonado

    (Universidad del Rosario)

Abstract

We model the decisions of young individuals to stay in school or drop-out and engage in criminal activities. We build on the literature on human capital and crime engagement and use the framework of Banerjee (1993) that assumes that the information needed to engage in crime arrives in the form of a rumor and that individuals update their beliefs about the profitability of crime relative to education. These assumptions allow us to study the effect of social interactions on crime. We first show that a society with fully rational students is less vulnerable to crime than an otherwise identical society with boundedly rational students. We also investigate the spillovers from the actions of talented students to less talented students and show that policies that decrease the cost of education for talented students may increase the vulnerability of less talented students to crime. This is always the case when the heterogeneity of students with respect to talent is sufficiently small.

Suggested Citation

  • Darwin Cortés & Guido Friebel & Darío Maldonado, 2010. "Crime and Education in a Model of Information Transmission," Working Papers 2010.129, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    • Handle: RePEc:fem:femwpa:2010.129
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/NDL2010-129.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Los retornos sociales de la educación: A pesar de que la sociedad gana, algunos pueden perder
      by David Bardey in Foco Económico on 2015-04-15 02:18:14

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Human Capital; The Economics of Rumors; Social Interactions; Urban Economics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:fem:femwpa:2010.129. 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: Alberto Prina Cerai (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/feemmit.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.