EGOB3518 Solutions to the Problem of Crime
This class is designed to expose students to the problem of crime and potential solutions. Because crime is considered to be costly – both in terms of the damage it imposes on those directly affected by it, and in terms of the allocation of scarce public resources used to combat it – those committed to designing and implementing public policies must understand what works and why in confronting challenges to order. This task is particularly urgent in the case of Latin America: the region holds the dubious distinction of being the world’s most violent. For Colombia, figuring out what policy solutions have worked elsewhere is crucial, given that the country has struggled to confront organized crime and, despite real material gains in the security situation, it continues to face problems of urban and rural violence. As we will see, much of the existing evidence on what works and why comes from contexts in the developed world; one of our tasks will be to theorize responsibly about how those findings might travel to our own region.
While this class is designed principally to understand how governments can effectively respond to specific criminal behaviors, we will also gain a deeper understanding about what drives criminals to engage in illicit activities in the first place. To do so, we will engage with a host of different topics, including but not limited to different models of policing, the role of imprisonment and rehabilitation in preventing recidivism, body-worn and street cameras to detect and record criminal activity, over-consumption of alcohol, and the legalization and decriminalization of drugs, among other issues.
Throughout the class we will focus on causal identification; that is, we will seek to ensure that the effects of different policy interventions studied can be attributed to those
interventions, rather than to other confounding factors. Given this focus, we will spend some time at the beginning of the course reviewing the basics of causal identification and econometric models. In particular, we will assess the intuitions and mechanics behind quasi-experimental and experimental research designs, which are the most reliable ways to assess the causal impact of specific public policy interventions.
Periodo en el que se ofrece el curso
202010
Idioma en el que se ofrece el curso
Español
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