Syllabus
1. Crime and rationality
2. Becker’s model of crime and optimal punishment
3. Does punishment cut crime? Empirical evidence
4. Prisons: incapacitation and specific deterrence
5. Crime in the courtroom: Economics of criminal procedure
6. Corruption: measurement and anti-corruption measures
7. White-collar crime
8. Crime-control policies in the digital age
9. Illegal markets
Annotation
The course studies crime from an economic perspective, an approach that proved fruitful since Gary Becker’s (1968) path-breaking paper on crime and punishment. We will ask questions such as whether criminals are rational and how they respond to changes in the probability and severity of punishment. Fighting crime is expensive, so a natural question for an economist to ask is how to design an efficient crime-control policy. Special topics will include, among others, the link between abortion and crime, and corruption, and the trade-offs between the costs of the criminal proces and justice. The course will present a large amount of empirical material: we will focus on how to critically read and interpret empirical facts.
Learning outcomes and competences:
Upon the completion of the course, the students should:
- Understand key concepts in the economics of crime.
- Be able to evaluate alternative crime-control measures from the perspective of economic efficiency
- Be able to critically read empirical research on crime, the legal regulation of the criminal activity, and criminal procedure.
Important information about the prerequisites: The course requires prior knowledge of economics at the level of an introductory microeconomics course (e.g., Mankiw, G.: Principles of Economics, chapters 1-19). For the Faculty of Law regular master students, this implies that they should have completed the course Theory of national economy I. Throughout the classes and exams, we will presume that the students have the requisite knowledge of this material.