Unemployment and crime: the role of apprehension

An increase in the unemployment rate decreases the opportunity cost of crime and increases the crime rate according to standard microeconomics models. However, a large body of empirical research has shown that an increase in unemployment may increase or decrease crime. By incorporating the return to crime into standard economic models, this paper shows that an increase in unemployment, as in recessions, decreases the opportunity cost of crime and the return to crime as well. As a result, the effect of unemployment on crime is ambiguous and depends on the apprehension rate. An increase in the unemployment rate tends to decrease the crime rate at lower apprehension rates, but to increase it at higher apprehension rates. An increase in the generosity of unemployment insurance benefits does not necessarily reduce the crime rate, and the effect of more generous unemployment insurance on crime depends again on the apprehension rate.     

Violence,agrarian radicalism and electoral politics: Reflections on the Indian people's front

I am concerned here with the political responses of peasants on the social and economic margin and of agricultural labourers. The argument is that there is in India a vital and dynamic peasant activism happening at many levels of social and economic interest including among the rural poor. I want to understand these phenomena in Indian terms and in local terms, in other words, what is happening in the fields and villages where most Indians live. This raises the fundamental issue of the language or idiom in which agrarian politics, that is the politics of dissent, is expressed and the equally important question of who is listening and what is or is not being done in response. I develop these ideas around the experience of the Indian People's Front in the last decade, specifically in Bihar, while focussing on the arena of electoral politics which the IPF entered seriously in 1989.