THE SOCIOECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF CRIME. A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Abstract
Starting from Becker’s seminal paper we review the first contributions to the economics of crime, stressing how with the first model
of criminal choice, due to Becker, the way of conceiving criminal behaviours has drastically changed. In fact, criminal choice ceases to be
viewed as determined by mental illness or bad attitudes, but it is considered on the basis of a maximization problem in which agents have
to compare costs and benefits of legal and illegal activities taking in
account the probability of being arrested and punished and the expected returns from crime. Criminal decision is an economic choice by
rational agents. In the second part of the survey, in which we focus our
attention on empirical works, we present the main recent contributions
to the economics of crime; in particular we outline the determinants
of criminal behaviours and explore the relationships existing between
crime and socioeconomic variables emerging from the literature. In
fact, the economics of crime interacts with different and heterogeneous
fields (i.e. sociology, criminology, psychiatry and geography). It is
closely related to poverty, social exclusion, wage and income inequality,
cultural and family background, level of education and other economic
and social factors that may affect individual’s propensity to commit
crimes such as cultural characteristics, age and sex.