Crime after a Fertility Shock: Offending Behaviour of the ’Children of the Wall
Speaker
Abstract
| Birth selectivity has a large impact on children’s future outcomes. This paper uses the fall of the Berlin Wall as an exogenous fertility shock: the number of births in East Germany dropped by more than 50 percent over a three years period after reunification of the two countries. Using a difference in difference strategy, we estimate that individuals from this cohort commit more crimes per head than both younger/older cohorts and their West German peers. This higher criminal propensity can be explained by negative selection whereby parents who gave birth to children during this period of great uncertainty have on average lower parenting skills. We explore underlying mechanisms and find that emotional attachment and intergenerational transmission of risk attitudes appear to play an important role in the fertility-crime relationship. |
| Contact information: Andreas Pick (pick@ese.eur.nl) Wing Wah Tham (tham@ese.eur.nl) |
| The seminars in Econometrics are supported by the Tinbergen Institute and ERIM. http://www.econometric-institute.org/seminars |
