Routledge Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition
1 A branch of NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS which analyses the decision making of criminals in terms of a comparison of the marginal benefit of succeeding and the MARGINAL COST of being detected and sentenced. This celebrated analysis of BECKER’S is mainly applicable to the study of property offences.
2 A study of the effects of allocating resources to law enforcement and crime prevention. The poor quality of crime statistics, partly caused by varying rates of reporting offences, makes empirical work difficult.
References
Anderson, R.W. (1976) The Economics of Crime, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Andreano, R.
and Siegfried, J.J. (1980) The Economics of Crime, Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.
Becker, G.S. (1968) ‘Crime and punishment: an economic approach’, Journal of Political Economy 76:169–217.
Fiorentini, G. and Peltzman, S. (eds) (1995) The economics of organised crime, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
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