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Is it possible to think of criminal participation as a decision motivated by the ‘homo economicus’ incentives that are thought to drive many other human choices studied in economics? It took a while for economists to properly consider this question theoretically, and we are now still testing in real life if the assumption of rational crime are observed in real life. Do the police really reduce crime? Is education a good tool to decrease offending? Does legalisation of drugs increase consumption?

These are the kind of questions that will also be discussed during this lecture, looking at research results from studies that have explored these issues.   

About Olivier Marie

Oliver Marie joined the Department of Economics at Erasmus School of Economics in 2016 after having spent 8 years at Maastricht University following from graduating from a PhD in economics in the UK. He studies, using natural experiments, the impact of human decisions linked to crime participation, education investment, and family formation.

He uses administrative information together with historical data to test, using state of the art econometric methods,  such hypothesis around exogenous shocks that enable causal interpretation. The aim of his research is to better understand human decision making in various contexts in order to better inform policy design.

More information

Some of the papers discussed during this lecture:

• by Gary S. Becker in Journal of Political Economy, 1968, 2, 169-217
• by Stephen Machin and Olivier Marie in Journal of the European Economic Association, 2011, 9 , 678-701    
• by Stephen Machin, and Olivier Marie, and Suncica Vujic in The Economic Journal, 2011, 121, 463-484 
• ' by Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz in the Review of Economic Studies, 2017, 84, 1210-1237
•  by Arnaud Chevalier and Olivier Marie in the Journal of Political Economy, 2017, 125, 393-430