Olivier Marie will give a lecture (in English) on Thursday 13 April at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He will explain how economists have come to study the reasons why people commit crime and used econometric tools to evaluate what police are best suited to reduce it.
- Speaker
- Date
- Thursday 13 Apr 2023, 15:30 - 17:00
- Type
- Lecture
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- T3-16
- Building
- Mandeville
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:
- Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach by Gary S. Becker in Journal of Political Economy, 1968, 2, 169-217
- Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative by Stephen Machin and Olivier Marie in Journal of the European Economic Association, 2011, 9 , 678-701
- The Crime Reducing Effect of Education by Stephen Machin, and Olivier Marie, and Suncica Vujic in The Economic Journal, 2011, 121, 463-484
- 'High Achievers?' Cannabis Access and Academic Performance by Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz in the Review of Economic Studies, 2017, 84, 1210-1237
- Economic Uncertainty, Parental Selection, and Children’s Educational Outcome by Arnaud Chevalier and Olivier Marie in the Journal of Political Economy, 2017, 125, 393-430
- More information
