RCN: Reducing Criminal Behavior by Developing Human (and Social) Capital

没有任何一门学科拥有足够广度的视角和工具来应对犯罪、暴力和违法行为带来的社会挑战。然而，目前还没有足够的论坛来创建一个持续的跨学科研究人员社区来解决这些问题并培训新学者采用这种更广泛的视角。第二个问题是，虽然一些最具成本效益的监禁替代方案可能包括解决人力资本赤字和改变社会环境的努力，但对这些问题的研究往往忽视与犯罪相关的结果。第三个限制是，对犯罪的研究往往是地方性的，并且忽略了其他国家内部或之间的政策或社会条件变化的潜在见解。 该提案旨在建立一个研究协调网络（RCN），旨在建立一个国际跨学科研究人员网络来研究这些问题，其中包括： 讨论新研究的年度会议；通过博士前和博士后“NSF / NBER 研究员”的跨学科队列进行培训，帮助组织会议并积极参与；数据组件，研究员可以通过该组件确定新的数据源，以添加到 NBER 网站和其他来源上可用的数据源中；以及利用 NBER 网站卓越能力的传播组件。 科学效益将来自共享数据和研究方法、跨学科和国家的新研究合作、结合社会项目的成本效益评估对犯罪相关结果的更广泛考虑，以及对初级研究人员的指导。这一过程产生的新知识将服务于公众利益，以尽可能低的社会成本减少犯罪行为。

No single discipline has sufficient breadth of perspective and tools to address the societal challenges posed by crime, violence, and lawlessness. Yet currently there is no adequate forum for creating a sustained inter-disciplinary community of researchers to address these issues and train new scholars to adopt this broader perspective. A second problem is that while some of the most cost-effective alternatives to incarceration may include efforts to address human capital deficits and change the social environment, research on those issues too often ignores crime-related outcomes. A third limitation is that research on crime tends to be provincial, and ignores potential insights from variation in policy or social conditions within or across other countries. This proposal is to establish a research coordination network (RCN) that would seek to create an international inter-disciplinary network of researchers to study these issues, and which would include: annual meetings to discuss new research; a training component via an interdisciplinary cohort of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral "NSF / NBER fellows" to help organize the meetings and actively participate; a data component through which fellows would identify new data sources to add to the those available on the NBER websites and other sources; and a dissemination component that leverages the outstanding capacities of the NBER website. The scientific benefits will flow from shared data and research methods, new research collaborations across disciplines and nations, the expanded consideration of crime-related outcomes in conjunction with the cost-benefit evaluation of social programs, and mentorship of junior researchers. New knowledge generated from this process will serve the public interest in reducing criminal behavior at lowest possible social cost.