Objectives

To measure the effect of arranged marriages on criminal convictions among male ethnic minority youth in Denmark.

Methods

To identify the effect, we rely on administrative data from before and after a national policy reform in 2002 that restricted ethnic minority youths’ access to their most prevalent type of marriage until both spouses were at least 24 years of age. We use difference-in-differences estimation and meticulously analyze potential time trends in the data.

Results

Although the reform substantially decreased marriage rates in both the short (24 percent decrease at age 24) and longer (10 percent at age 30) run, this reform effect produced no response in criminal conviction risks in neither short nor long run.

Conclusion

Criminologists 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.

中文翻译：

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限制丹麦少数民族青年的包办婚姻机会：对刑事定罪的影响

目标

衡量包办婚姻对丹麦少数民族男性青年刑事定罪的影响。

方法

为了确定这种影响，我们依赖于 2002 年国家政策改革前后的行政数据，该改革限制少数民族青年在配偶双方至少年满 24 岁之前获得他们最普遍的婚姻类型。我们使用差异中的差异估计并仔细分析数据中的潜在时间趋势。

结果

尽管改革在短期（24 岁降低 24%）和长期（30 岁降低 10%）两方面大幅降低了结婚率，但无论从短期还是长期来看，这种改革效应都没有对刑事定罪风险产生任何反应。

结论

犯罪学家讨论社会制度（例如婚姻）是否会影响对犯罪的抵制，或者这种关联是否是由未观察到的异质性驱动的。已经提出了几种经验策略来解决讨论。我们对这方面研究的贡献是一种依赖于自然实验的替代经验策略。我们的研究仅关注一种背景下的一种特定类型的婚姻，并关注刑事定罪而非行为本身——这是重要的限制。尽管如此，结果一致拒绝了我们研究中的婚姻影响刑事定罪的假设。