Identifying Classes of Explanations for Crime Drop: Period and Cohort Effects for New York State

A formal decomposition of declining youth crime in Denmark

“…For example, Kim, Bushway, and Tsao (2016) find that neither penal policies nor policing strategies explain changes in US arrest rates between 1990 and 2010. Rather, the changes are best explained by differences across birth cohorts.…”

Environmental Inequality: The Social Causes and Consequences of Lead Exposure

“…Cook & Laub (2002) suggest instead that the rise and fall of homicide in the late twentieth century followed a similar pattern for all cohorts. Kim et al (2016), in contrast, conclude that the drop in the felony arrest rate in New York State was mostly due to the decline in arrests among birth cohorts born after the 1970s. Another paper uses age-period-cohort models to study the relationship between blood lead levels and age-specific UCR homicide arrest rates (McCall & Land 2004).…”

Rethinking one of criminology’s ‘brute facts’: The age–crime curve and the crime drop in Scotland

“…The number of recent studies ( Blumstein, 2006 ; Cook and Laub, 2002 ; Farrell et al, 2015 ; and Kim et al, 2015 ) that analysed change in the ACC have very different aims from those conducted as part of the variance/invariance debate. Rather than analysing ACC as a way to understand the individual-level relationship between a person’s age and their propensity to offend, these contemporary studies use variation in the ACC to help unpick trends in aggregate crime rates.…”

“…This is more in line with the concerns of macro-criminology than of micro-criminology ( Wilson, 2012 ). Analysis of the ACC helps to understand macro-level crime trends by assessing if change in crime has been uniform across age or concentrated in particular age groups ( Kim et al, 2015 ). The growing number of recent studies that have examined change in the age distribution of crime are primarily motivated by a desire to understand the recent decline in rates of recorded crime seen in the USA and Western Europe since the early 1990s ( Van Dijk and Tseloni, 2012 ).…”

“…First described in the 1830s by Adolphe Quetelet (2003 [1831] ), this relationship has been characterized as ‘one of the brute facts of criminology’ ( Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983 : 555). However, recent years have seen a number of new analyses of change in the ACC ( Blumstein, 2006 ; Cook and Laub, 2002 ; Farrell et al, 2015 ; Kim et al, 2015 ) that represent a different approach to the study of the ACC, using change in this distribution as a way to unpick trends in macro-level crime rates. This contrasts with previous work, which was primarily concerned with the description and explanation of the micro-level relationship between a person’s age and propensity to offend (for example, Greenberg, 1985 ; Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983 ).…”