Volume 37, Number 3 (Summer) 2002

Williams, Jenny and Robin C. Sickles. 2002. "An Analysis of the Crime as Work Model: Evidence from the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Control Cohort Study." Journal of Human Resources 37(3):479-509.

This paper builds on the neoclassical model of time allocation introduced by Gronau (1977), and revisited in the context of crime as work by Grogger (1998), by disaggregating the types of capital characterizing an individual to include social and criminal capital in addition to traditional human capital. The combination of juvenile and adult arrest data, labor market, and background variables make the sample we analyze, the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study, especially well-suited to examining the relative importance of these aspects of individual capital. We find that human capital measures such as number of years of schooling have a significant impact on criminal choice in adulthood. We find that social capital measures such as peer influences during youth are also key predictors of criminality.