Kirjahaku

There is a widespread belief among criminologists, judges and the like that criminals are better off serving non-custodial sentences instead of going to prison. However, empirical evidence of the effects of community service is scarce. This paper exploits a policy reform that implemented the use of community service as punishment among specific groups of criminals in order to assess the causal effect of community service on post-sentence income, dependency on social benefits, and crime.

A number of studies investigate the extent to which levels of welfare benefits reduce crime among the unemployed. This paper expands this literature by testing whether the intensity of other welfare programs aimed at the unemployed affects their criminal activity, using evidence from a Danish social experiment that randomly assigned active labor market programs (ALMPs) of different levels of intensity to newly unemployed individuals.

This paper investigates the effect of intensified ALMPs, by increasing the threat of program participation, on post-unemployment wages. For this purpose, it exploits a social experiment conducted in two Danish counties, where approximately 5,000 unemployed people were randomly selected to receive either a standard treatment or an intensified treatment. It uses a Heckman selection model and finds that an intensified threat of program participation increases the probability of finding a job in the short run, but decreases wages in the same period.