Inventive, important, elegant new @nberpubs paper by @daddaces @EricLindqvist @robertostling & Christofer Schroeder indicates that poverty per se may not be a fundamental cause of crime. It’s well known that poor people commit more crimes. But why? One set of theories relates to whether poor people commit crimes to get money; or is there a psychological motivation (anger, resentment); or is there an environmental driver (less education, less police protection, toxic exposures, social exclusion). Such causes would imply that giving people money should reduce their criminality. A second set of theories, instead, considers whether crime is driven by some other factor (such as inborn intelligence, morality, impulsivity, etc.) that is correlated with both poverty and crime. Such theories would imply that giving people money will NOT reduce their criminality. To tell the difference, we would need an actual or a "natural" experiment that randomly allocates money to people. And this paper does just that, linking lottery players who win and do not win money to their subsequent criminal behavior (and to their children's delinquency). Bottom line: wealth shocks do not reduce criminal behavior. nber.org/papers/w31962