Anna Bindler

The Costs of Crime

Currently, Anna Bindler is working on the societal costs of crime. In previous work (Bindler and Ketel, Journal of Labor Economics, 2022), she documented the losses in labor income and the increased need of social benefit receipt for victims of crime, in particular violent crime. In their work, the authors leveraged detailed register data on victimizations in the Netherlands to trace out the detrimental consequences for crime victims in the working-age population. The results show that the economic and social cost of crime are significantly higher than existing estimates suggest.

Ms. Bindler’s ongoing work builds on these results, but switches focus to the direct and indirect costs of crime for youths in terms of their educational trajectories. Juvenile indirect exposure to neighborhood or school level crime has been shown to lead to worse education outcomes and unequal opportunities, but evidence on the effects of direct (individual) victimization during this critical point in the lifecycle is scarce at present. Together with her co-author Nadine Ketel, Ms. Bindler will work with detailed data for primary and secondary school children that can be linked to data on victimization records to address this question.

Anna Bindler is an applied microeconomist working primarily in the fields of the Economics of Crime, Labor Economics and Empirical Law and Economics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor economics and criminal justice and include the causes and consequences of crime victimization, crime control policy and criminal justice institutions, biases and discrimination in the criminal justice system, and precursors and importance of labor market opportunities.

Anna Bindler is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Cologne and a member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets and Public Policy. She is affiliated with the Department of Economics at the University of Gothenburg, and a research affiliate both at CEPR (Labor Economics) and CAGE/University of Warwick. Before joining the University of Cologne, Ms. Bindler was an Assistant Professor at the University of Gothenburg. She obtained her PhD in 2015 from University College London.