“Ensayos en microeconomía aplicada al crimen y las finanzas”

Abstract

To what extent should young people be normatively held responsible for committing a crime? To contribute to this ongoing debate, our study explores the influence of inequality of opportunity on the behavior of juvenile crime. By drawing upon Roemer’s theoretical framework and employing administrative data from Chile, we conduct an empirical analysis to assess the degree to which the responsibility for committing a crime can be attributed to structural factors (termed circumstances) versus decisions made by the perpetrator (termed agency). Our findings reveal compelling evidence of significant inequality of opportunity within this context. Specifically, when explaining crime among males, the contribution of circumstances varies between 46.44% and 39.58%. In contrast, the role of circumstances in high school completion appears to be less relevant, with levels ranging from 34.80% to 26.01%. Importantly, our study challenges previous literature, suggesting that an alternative conceptualization of equality of opportunity yields a distinct understanding regarding the relative contributions of agency versus circumstances.