Restricting Arranged Marriage Opportunities for Danish Minority Youth: Implications for Criminal Convictions

ConclusionCriminologists discuss whether social institutions, such as marriage, influence desistance from crime or whether the association is driven by unobserved heterogeneity. Several empirical strategies have been proposed to settle the discussion. Our contribution to this line of research is an alternative empirical strategy that relies on a natural experiment. Our study focuses only on one specific type of marriage in one context and focuses on criminal convictions rather than behavior per se —which are important limitations. Still, results uniformly reject the hypothesis that the marriages in our study influenced criminal convictions.
Source: Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Category: Criminology Source Type: research