Crime, Education and Peer Pressure

We present a dynamic two-period model of individual behaviour with heterogeneous agents in which individuals decide how to allocate their disposable time between education, crime and work in the legal sector. Education has a multiple role: it implies higher expected wages in the legal sector, increasing the opportunity cost of committing crime and it has a sort of “civilization” effect that makes more costly to engage in criminal activities. We model this effect by introducing a peer pressure function.