Assessing the Effect of Adolescent Employment on Involvement in Criminal Activity

This article considers the problem of estimating the effect of a binary independent variable (employment) on a binary outcome variable (involvement in criminal activity) for a nationally representative sample of adolescents (ages 15-18). The authors’ bivariate analysis confirms a common finding from the literature, that adolescent employment is associated with increased risk of involvement in criminal activity. They then turn to the problem of assessing whether this association is sensitive to plausible assumptions about the impact of other variables (both observed and unobserved) on both employment and crime. This assessment reveals that both the sign and magnitude of the maximum likelihood estimate of the employment effect are quite sensitive to these assumptions. Based on this evidence, they conclude that future efforts to understand the adolescent work-crime relationship will benefit from resolving the ambiguities identified by their analysis.