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

没有任何一门学科有足够的视角和工具来应对犯罪、暴力和无法无天所带来的社会挑战。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养新的学者采用这种更广泛的观点。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努力解决人力资本赤字和改变社会环境，但对这些问题的研究往往忽视了与犯罪有关的结果。第三个限制是，对犯罪的研究往往是地方性的，忽视了从其他国家内部或国家之间的政策或社会条件变化中获得的潜在见解。这项建议是建立一个研究协调网络（RCN），它将寻求建立一个研究这些问题的国际跨学科研究人员网络，其中将包括：年度会议讨论新的研究；通过一个跨学科的博士生和博士后“NSF / NBER研究员”的培训部分，帮助组织会议并积极参与；一个数据组成部分，研究员可以通过它确定新的数据来源，添加到国家经济研究局网站和其他来源的可用数据中；以及利用国家经济研究局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扩大对犯罪相关结果的考虑，以及对初级研究人员的指导。从这一过程中产生的新知识将服务于以尽可能低的社会成本减少犯罪行为的公共利益。

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.