Things I've Been Reading # 5

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1. This paper should absolutely cinch up any question on whether poverty causes crime. It does not. Rather, the things which cause crime also cause poverty. The authors use a data set on Swedish lottery winners to estimate the effect of an exogenous wealth shock, conditional on playing. These lotteries are quite well-subscribed among the public, and the government also records precisely who buys the tickets and how much. This means that when they fail to find statistically significant effects of winning on crime, this is meaningful. They also find that there are no statistically significant effects on the children which suggests that criminality is affected by some factor which is passed down from generation to generation without being affected by income. Views vary on what that might be.