AN ECONOMIC-ANALYSIS OF THE AGE-CRIME PROFILE

The age-crime profile is one of the most established and prominent emp irical regularities in social science. This paper formulates an econom ic dynamic model of illegal behavior to explain the age-crime profile. The model offers a new interpretation of the age-crime profile that i s entirely different from the prevailing one in the literature. The im plications of the model are testable and are consistent with the empir ical evidence examined in the paper. The analysis shows that intertemp oral criminal decisions can be modeled as a dynamic consumption-invest ment problem.