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  5. Family Formation and Crime

American Economic Journal:
Applied Economics

ISSN 1945-7782 (Print) | ISSN 1945-7790 (Online)

Family Formation and Crime

  • Maxim Massenkoff
  • Evan K. Rose
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (Forthcoming)

Abstract

We perform a large-scale analysis of the impact of family formation on crime. For mothers, criminal arrests drop precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, decreasing 50 percent overall. Men show a sustained 20 percent decline in crime that begins around pregnancy, although arrests for domestic violence spike at birth. A separate design using parents of stillborn children to estimate counterfactual arrest rates reinforces the main findings. Marriage, in contrast, is not associated with any sudden changes and marks the completion of a gradual 50 percent decline in arrests for both men and women.

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