Learning by Offending: How Do Criminals Learn about Criminal Law?
利用法国对累犯大幅加刑的自然实验，发现只有亲身经历改革的罪犯才会减少目标犯罪，而同案犯有学习效应，其他罪犯则没有。
This paper investigates how criminals learn about criminal laws. It uses a natural experiment in which sentences were drastically increased for a specific type of recidivism in France. In the short run, advertising the reform did not trigger any change in criminal behavior. However, people who had firsthand experience of the reform learned about it and later committed significantly fewer targeted crimes, but the same number of nontargeted crimes. Learning appears to be limited to individuals with direct experience of the law. While codefendants also learned, other criminal peers and defendants attending the same trial for another case did not.