Thomas A Loughran
Biographic Data
| ID | 286938 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas A Loughran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas A |
| FAMILY NAME | Loughran |
| SIGNATURE | LOUGHRAN T A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 314 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Illicit Income and Victimization Risk: Evidence on Compensating Wage Differentials
While the criminological decision-making literature has primarily focused on risk in terms of detection or apprehension, it is merely one component of an individual's risk calculus. Making money in the illicit market carries more inherent risks than making money in the legal market, including mortality, injury and other types of victimization. Using panel data on individuals who report both illicit earnings and incidence of violent victimization …
Prognosticating Offending in Early Adulthood: How Early Can We Predict
Estimating Latent Preferences for Crime: Implications for Rational Choice, Identity, and Desistance Theories
Latent preferences feature prominently in rational choice and symbolic interaction theories but are difficult to capture empirically. To address this limitation, we introduce a discrete choice random utility model to estimate latent preferences for risk. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance study, we estimate the statistical model and demonstrate the usefulness of the preference estimates. We find that risk preferences vary between- and wit…
Offending Frequency and Responses to Illegal Monetary Incentives
Structural predictors of choice: Testing a multilevel rational choice theory of crime
Extant research has provided support for the micro‐level predictions of rational choice models of crime. Yet, a central feature of the rational choice perspective in the broader social sciences—that it is multilevel in focus, situating individuals within broader community social structures—has been neglected within criminology. In this article, we discuss and test a model that links community structural characteristics to several individual expec…
Variation in Exposure to Violence in Early Adolescence Distinguishes between Intimate Partner Violence Victimization and Perpetration among Young Men Involved in the Justice System
Perceived arrest risk, psychic rewards, and offense specialization: A partial test of rational choice theory
In prior tests of Beckerian rational choice theory, the notion that individuals are responsive to the (dis)incentives associated with crime has been supported. Much of this research has comprised composite scores of perceived rewards and risks of multiple, often disparate, crime types that are then used to predict “general” offending behavior. Although the results of such prior tests are informative, we believe that this tendency has resulted in …
Behavioral criminology and public policy
Research Summary Public policy, including crime policy, is heavily shaped by economic theory. Recently, refinements based on the application of behavioral insights into the study of public policy applications have become en vogue. Although criminologists have made some inroads into incorporating behavioral principals into the study of crime and offender decision‐making, these contributions have mainly been limited to the area of risk. In this art…
Police Violence, Procedural Justice, and Public Perceptions of Legitimacy
Victim Compensation Policy and White‐Collar Crime: Public Preferences in a National Willingness‐to‐Pay Survey
Research Summary We use survey data from a nationally representative sample to explore public support for taxpayer‐funded victim compensation programs for financial fraud, consumer fraud, identity theft, and burglary. We use contingent valuation (willingness‐to‐pay) methodology to infer preferences for compensation programs and explore predictors of those preferences. Overall, our findings reveal that the public strongly supports the implementati…
Testing the Transitivity of Reported Risk Perceptions: Evidence of Coherent Arbitrariness
An often implicit assumption of perceptual deterrence tests is that the elicited values pertaining to arrest risk reflect stable underlying beliefs. But researchers in other disciplines have found that reported expectations are highly susceptible to exogenous factors (e.g., anchors and question ordering), indicating that such values are somewhat arbitrary responses to probabilistic questions. At the same time, reported expectations are coherent w…
On the Measurement and Identification of Turning Points in Criminology
Since their introduction to criminology, turning points have been of substantial theoretical and empirical focus for scholars of desistance. In this review, we consider how criminologists have sought to identify change in the criminal career by reflecting on the identification and measurement of turning points. We contend that important life events, such as marriage and employment, are endogenous to the desistance process and as such present chal…
Juvenile Waiver as a Mechanism of Social Stratification: A Focus on Human Capital
The historic transformations of the criminal justice system must be justified and interpreted through the effects on criminals (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2011). The push for harsher sentencing policies for juvenile offenders specifically through the use of juvenile waiver to criminal court is one such policy that is not well understood in terms of its effects on offenders, especially in terms of broader outcomes beyond recidivism. We use data from t…
On the Reliability and Validity of Self‐reported Illegal Earnings: Implications for the Study of Criminal Achievement
The study of the monetary returns to criminal activity is a central component in many emerging areas of criminology, including rational choice and offender decision‐making, desistance, and criminal achievement. Scholars have been increasingly captivated with specification of the earnings function and with examining how variations in illegal earnings predict important outcomes such as persistence in offending. The potential utility of findings in …
Crime and Legal Work: A Markovian Model of the Desistance Process
Over the past two decades, two dominant themes have emerged in the study of desistance from crime: desistance is a gradual process, and embedded in the desistance process are important life events or turning points. Yet sociological and criminological empirical studies of desistance tend to focus on these two processes separately. Using a panel of serious offenders, we examine the progression over age of the probability of participation in legal …
Self-Control as Self-Regulation: A Return to Control Theory
In an effort to build on previous theory and research it is argued that self-control is not synonymous with impulsivity, but rather should be conceptualized as self-regulation: the capacity to override impulsive desires. Using a sample of college students and a sample of serious adult criminal offenders, we test four hypotheses regarding the relationship between self-regulation, impulsivity, and several outcome measures reflecting antisocial or c…
The Policy‐to‐Perceptions Link in Deterrence: Time to Retire the Clearance Rate
Effect of Gun Carrying on Perceptions of Risk Among Adolescent Offenders
Objectives. We observed how perceptions of risks, costs, crime rewards, and violence exposure change as individual gun-carrying behavior changes among high-risk adolescents. Methods. We analyzed a longitudinal study (2000–2010) of serious juvenile offenders in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, assessing within-person changes in risk and reward perceptions, and violence exposure as individuals initiated or ceased gun …
Can Rational Choice Be Considered a General Theory of Crime? Evidence From Individual‐level Panel Data
In the last few decades, rational choice theory has emerged as a bedrock theory in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. Although rational choice theory has been available to criminologists for many years now, the field has not embraced it as other disciplines have. Moreover, rational choice scholars have fueled this skepticism of the theory's generality by modeling offender decision making that is one‐sided—large…
On the Measurement and Properties of Ambiguity in Probabilistic Expectations
Survey respondents' probabilistic expectations are now widely used in many fields to study risk perceptions, decision-making processes, and behavior. Researchers have developed several methods to account for the fact that the probability of an event may be more ambiguous for some respondents than others, but few prior studies have empirically compared the approaches. This article contrasts two of the most prominent methods using data from an expe…
Comparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth
The Returns to Criminal Capital
Human capital theory posits that individuals increase their labor market returns through investments in education and training. This concept has been studied extensively across several disciplines. An analog concept of criminal capital, the focus of some speculation and limited empirical study, remains considerably less developed theoretically and methodologically. This article offers a formal theoretical model of criminal capital indicators and …
Testing a Bayesian Learning Theory of Deterrence Among Serious Juvenile Offenders
The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an …
On Ambiguity in Perceptions of Risk: Implications for Criminal Decision Making and Deterrence
Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level—increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit o…
Estimating a Dose‐response Relationship Between Length of Stay and Future Recidivism in Serious Juvenile Offenders
The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confinement within the juvenile justice system that maximizes the public safety and therapeutic benefits of…
Testing a Bayesian Learning Theory of Deterrence Among Serious Juvenile Offenders
The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an …
Can Rational Choice Be Considered a General Theory of Crime? Evidence From Individual‐level Panel Data
In the last few decades, rational choice theory has emerged as a bedrock theory in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. Although rational choice theory has been available to criminologists for many years now, the field has not embraced it as other disciplines have. Moreover, rational choice scholars have fueled this skepticism of the theory's generality by modeling offender decision making that is one‐sided—large…
Estimating a Dose‐response Relationship Between Length of Stay and Future Recidivism in Serious Juvenile Offenders
The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confinement within the juvenile justice system that maximizes the public safety and therapeutic benefits of…
On Ambiguity in Perceptions of Risk: Implications for Criminal Decision Making and Deterrence
Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level—increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit o…
The Returns to Criminal Capital
Human capital theory posits that individuals increase their labor market returns through investments in education and training. This concept has been studied extensively across several disciplines. An analog concept of criminal capital, the focus of some speculation and limited empirical study, remains considerably less developed theoretically and methodologically. This article offers a formal theoretical model of criminal capital indicators and …
Comparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth
On the Measurement and Identification of Turning Points in Criminology
Since their introduction to criminology, turning points have been of substantial theoretical and empirical focus for scholars of desistance. In this review, we consider how criminologists have sought to identify change in the criminal career by reflecting on the identification and measurement of turning points. We contend that important life events, such as marriage and employment, are endogenous to the desistance process and as such present chal…
Testing the Transitivity of Reported Risk Perceptions: Evidence of Coherent Arbitrariness
An often implicit assumption of perceptual deterrence tests is that the elicited values pertaining to arrest risk reflect stable underlying beliefs. But researchers in other disciplines have found that reported expectations are highly susceptible to exogenous factors (e.g., anchors and question ordering), indicating that such values are somewhat arbitrary responses to probabilistic questions. At the same time, reported expectations are coherent w…
The Policy‐to‐Perceptions Link in Deterrence: Time to Retire the Clearance Rate
Structural predictors of choice: Testing a multilevel rational choice theory of crime
Extant research has provided support for the micro‐level predictions of rational choice models of crime. Yet, a central feature of the rational choice perspective in the broader social sciences—that it is multilevel in focus, situating individuals within broader community social structures—has been neglected within criminology. In this article, we discuss and test a model that links community structural characteristics to several individual expec…
Perceived arrest risk, psychic rewards, and offense specialization: A partial test of rational choice theory
In prior tests of Beckerian rational choice theory, the notion that individuals are responsive to the (dis)incentives associated with crime has been supported. Much of this research has comprised composite scores of perceived rewards and risks of multiple, often disparate, crime types that are then used to predict “general” offending behavior. Although the results of such prior tests are informative, we believe that this tendency has resulted in …
Behavioral criminology and public policy
Research Summary Public policy, including crime policy, is heavily shaped by economic theory. Recently, refinements based on the application of behavioral insights into the study of public policy applications have become en vogue. Although criminologists have made some inroads into incorporating behavioral principals into the study of crime and offender decision‐making, these contributions have mainly been limited to the area of risk. In this art…
Juvenile Waiver as a Mechanism of Social Stratification: A Focus on Human Capital
The historic transformations of the criminal justice system must be justified and interpreted through the effects on criminals (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2011). The push for harsher sentencing policies for juvenile offenders specifically through the use of juvenile waiver to criminal court is one such policy that is not well understood in terms of its effects on offenders, especially in terms of broader outcomes beyond recidivism. We use data from t…
Effect of Gun Carrying on Perceptions of Risk Among Adolescent Offenders
Objectives. We observed how perceptions of risks, costs, crime rewards, and violence exposure change as individual gun-carrying behavior changes among high-risk adolescents. Methods. We analyzed a longitudinal study (2000–2010) of serious juvenile offenders in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, assessing within-person changes in risk and reward perceptions, and violence exposure as individuals initiated or ceased gun …
On the Reliability and Validity of Self‐reported Illegal Earnings: Implications for the Study of Criminal Achievement
The study of the monetary returns to criminal activity is a central component in many emerging areas of criminology, including rational choice and offender decision‐making, desistance, and criminal achievement. Scholars have been increasingly captivated with specification of the earnings function and with examining how variations in illegal earnings predict important outcomes such as persistence in offending. The potential utility of findings in …
Self-Control as Self-Regulation: A Return to Control Theory
In an effort to build on previous theory and research it is argued that self-control is not synonymous with impulsivity, but rather should be conceptualized as self-regulation: the capacity to override impulsive desires. Using a sample of college students and a sample of serious adult criminal offenders, we test four hypotheses regarding the relationship between self-regulation, impulsivity, and several outcome measures reflecting antisocial or c…
On the Measurement and Properties of Ambiguity in Probabilistic Expectations
Survey respondents' probabilistic expectations are now widely used in many fields to study risk perceptions, decision-making processes, and behavior. Researchers have developed several methods to account for the fact that the probability of an event may be more ambiguous for some respondents than others, but few prior studies have empirically compared the approaches. This article contrasts two of the most prominent methods using data from an expe…
Victim Compensation Policy and White‐Collar Crime: Public Preferences in a National Willingness‐to‐Pay Survey
Research Summary We use survey data from a nationally representative sample to explore public support for taxpayer‐funded victim compensation programs for financial fraud, consumer fraud, identity theft, and burglary. We use contingent valuation (willingness‐to‐pay) methodology to infer preferences for compensation programs and explore predictors of those preferences. Overall, our findings reveal that the public strongly supports the implementati…
Crime and Legal Work: A Markovian Model of the Desistance Process
Over the past two decades, two dominant themes have emerged in the study of desistance from crime: desistance is a gradual process, and embedded in the desistance process are important life events or turning points. Yet sociological and criminological empirical studies of desistance tend to focus on these two processes separately. Using a panel of serious offenders, we examine the progression over age of the probability of participation in legal …
Estimating a Dose‐response Relationship Between Length of Stay and Future Recidivism in Serious Juvenile Offenders
The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confinement within the juvenile justice system that maximizes the public safety and therapeutic benefits of…
Testing a Bayesian Learning Theory of Deterrence Among Serious Juvenile Offenders
The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an …
On Ambiguity in Perceptions of Risk: Implications for Criminal Decision Making and Deterrence
Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level—increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit o…
The Returns to Criminal Capital
Human capital theory posits that individuals increase their labor market returns through investments in education and training. This concept has been studied extensively across several disciplines. An analog concept of criminal capital, the focus of some speculation and limited empirical study, remains considerably less developed theoretically and methodologically. This article offers a formal theoretical model of criminal capital indicators and …
Comparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth
On the Measurement and Properties of Ambiguity in Probabilistic Expectations
Survey respondents' probabilistic expectations are now widely used in many fields to study risk perceptions, decision-making processes, and behavior. Researchers have developed several methods to account for the fact that the probability of an event may be more ambiguous for some respondents than others, but few prior studies have empirically compared the approaches. This article contrasts two of the most prominent methods using data from an expe…
The Policy‐to‐Perceptions Link in Deterrence: Time to Retire the Clearance Rate
Effect of Gun Carrying on Perceptions of Risk Among Adolescent Offenders
Objectives. We observed how perceptions of risks, costs, crime rewards, and violence exposure change as individual gun-carrying behavior changes among high-risk adolescents. Methods. We analyzed a longitudinal study (2000–2010) of serious juvenile offenders in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, assessing within-person changes in risk and reward perceptions, and violence exposure as individuals initiated or ceased gun …
Can Rational Choice Be Considered a General Theory of Crime? Evidence From Individual‐level Panel Data
In the last few decades, rational choice theory has emerged as a bedrock theory in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. Although rational choice theory has been available to criminologists for many years now, the field has not embraced it as other disciplines have. Moreover, rational choice scholars have fueled this skepticism of the theory's generality by modeling offender decision making that is one‐sided—large…
On the Measurement and Identification of Turning Points in Criminology
Since their introduction to criminology, turning points have been of substantial theoretical and empirical focus for scholars of desistance. In this review, we consider how criminologists have sought to identify change in the criminal career by reflecting on the identification and measurement of turning points. We contend that important life events, such as marriage and employment, are endogenous to the desistance process and as such present chal…
Juvenile Waiver as a Mechanism of Social Stratification: A Focus on Human Capital
The historic transformations of the criminal justice system must be justified and interpreted through the effects on criminals (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2011). The push for harsher sentencing policies for juvenile offenders specifically through the use of juvenile waiver to criminal court is one such policy that is not well understood in terms of its effects on offenders, especially in terms of broader outcomes beyond recidivism. We use data from t…
On the Reliability and Validity of Self‐reported Illegal Earnings: Implications for the Study of Criminal Achievement
The study of the monetary returns to criminal activity is a central component in many emerging areas of criminology, including rational choice and offender decision‐making, desistance, and criminal achievement. Scholars have been increasingly captivated with specification of the earnings function and with examining how variations in illegal earnings predict important outcomes such as persistence in offending. The potential utility of findings in …
Crime and Legal Work: A Markovian Model of the Desistance Process
Over the past two decades, two dominant themes have emerged in the study of desistance from crime: desistance is a gradual process, and embedded in the desistance process are important life events or turning points. Yet sociological and criminological empirical studies of desistance tend to focus on these two processes separately. Using a panel of serious offenders, we examine the progression over age of the probability of participation in legal …
Self-Control as Self-Regulation: A Return to Control Theory
In an effort to build on previous theory and research it is argued that self-control is not synonymous with impulsivity, but rather should be conceptualized as self-regulation: the capacity to override impulsive desires. Using a sample of college students and a sample of serious adult criminal offenders, we test four hypotheses regarding the relationship between self-regulation, impulsivity, and several outcome measures reflecting antisocial or c…
Police Violence, Procedural Justice, and Public Perceptions of Legitimacy
Victim Compensation Policy and White‐Collar Crime: Public Preferences in a National Willingness‐to‐Pay Survey
Research Summary We use survey data from a nationally representative sample to explore public support for taxpayer‐funded victim compensation programs for financial fraud, consumer fraud, identity theft, and burglary. We use contingent valuation (willingness‐to‐pay) methodology to infer preferences for compensation programs and explore predictors of those preferences. Overall, our findings reveal that the public strongly supports the implementati…
Testing the Transitivity of Reported Risk Perceptions: Evidence of Coherent Arbitrariness
An often implicit assumption of perceptual deterrence tests is that the elicited values pertaining to arrest risk reflect stable underlying beliefs. But researchers in other disciplines have found that reported expectations are highly susceptible to exogenous factors (e.g., anchors and question ordering), indicating that such values are somewhat arbitrary responses to probabilistic questions. At the same time, reported expectations are coherent w…
Behavioral criminology and public policy
Research Summary Public policy, including crime policy, is heavily shaped by economic theory. Recently, refinements based on the application of behavioral insights into the study of public policy applications have become en vogue. Although criminologists have made some inroads into incorporating behavioral principals into the study of crime and offender decision‐making, these contributions have mainly been limited to the area of risk. In this art…
Variation in Exposure to Violence in Early Adolescence Distinguishes between Intimate Partner Violence Victimization and Perpetration among Young Men Involved in the Justice System
Perceived arrest risk, psychic rewards, and offense specialization: A partial test of rational choice theory
In prior tests of Beckerian rational choice theory, the notion that individuals are responsive to the (dis)incentives associated with crime has been supported. Much of this research has comprised composite scores of perceived rewards and risks of multiple, often disparate, crime types that are then used to predict “general” offending behavior. Although the results of such prior tests are informative, we believe that this tendency has resulted in …
Offending Frequency and Responses to Illegal Monetary Incentives
Structural predictors of choice: Testing a multilevel rational choice theory of crime
Extant research has provided support for the micro‐level predictions of rational choice models of crime. Yet, a central feature of the rational choice perspective in the broader social sciences—that it is multilevel in focus, situating individuals within broader community social structures—has been neglected within criminology. In this article, we discuss and test a model that links community structural characteristics to several individual expec…
Estimating Latent Preferences for Crime: Implications for Rational Choice, Identity, and Desistance Theories
Latent preferences feature prominently in rational choice and symbolic interaction theories but are difficult to capture empirically. To address this limitation, we introduce a discrete choice random utility model to estimate latent preferences for risk. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance study, we estimate the statistical model and demonstrate the usefulness of the preference estimates. We find that risk preferences vary between- and wit…
Prognosticating Offending in Early Adulthood: How Early Can We Predict
Illicit Income and Victimization Risk: Evidence on Compensating Wage Differentials
While the criminological decision-making literature has primarily focused on risk in terms of detection or apprehension, it is merely one component of an individual's risk calculus. Making money in the illicit market carries more inherent risks than making money in the legal market, including mortality, injury and other types of victimization. Using panel data on individuals who report both illicit earnings and incidence of violent victimization …
Crime Patterns and Interventions (20 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Criminology (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (11 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (7 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (7 works)