Crime, Families and the Economy: Micro-conditions as Moderator of Macro-effects

Since the early 1990s, increasing attention is being paid to the impact of life course transitions on criminal behavior. However, individuals’ life courses do not evolve in a vacuum but rather in the broad context of societal characteristics and developments. In this paper, we analyze whether there is an effect of macroeconomic circumstances on individuals’ criminal careers and whether this effect is conditional on marital status and parenthood. We employ micro-level data from a Dutch large-scale longitudinal study and enrich these with macro-level data. Using logistic panel data models for criminal behavior, we distinguish three types of effects: the macro-effect of experiencing declining economic times, the micro-effect of family composition and the interaction effect, indicating whether the effect of economic decline is differentiated by marital status and parenthood. We quantify economic decline either as an increase in the unemployment rate (objective and backward-looking measure) or as a decrease in consumer confidence (subjective and forward-looking). First, we find that an increase in the unemployment rate has no effect on criminal careers, but a decrease in the consumer confidence is associated with an increase in individual-level crime. Next, we confirm earlier results that marriage has a negative effect on crime, while parenthood has no effect. Finally, our results indicate that the detrimental effect of decreasing consumer confidence on criminal behavior is nullified for married individuals.