{"id":1417,"date":"2015-03-06T14:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T21:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/?p=1417"},"modified":"2015-03-06T14:55:17","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T21:55:17","slug":"thesis-corner-kenji-sekino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2015\/03\/06\/thesis-corner-kenji-sekino\/","title":{"rendered":"Thesis Corner | Kenji Sekino"},"content":{"rendered":"
Welcome back readers!\u00a0This week on Thesis Corner we have another interview for you, but first have you heard about the PIE Conference happening on campus this weekend? Economics department professor Lisa Nunn\u00a0will be one of the speakers tomorrow, along with many other campus voices about what frames their worlds. Check it out on\u00a0Facebook.<\/a><\/address>\n
Also, if you\u2019re\u00a0an Economics student, we will be having Social Hour this afternoon from 4-6pm at Engine\u00a0House No.\u00a09. The\u00a0department will provide the\u00a0appetizers\u00a0and conversation, all you need to do is show up!<\/address>\n
Now, here\u2019s Kenji Sekino and his thesis on crime economics,\u00a0“When Contempt Causes\u00a0Animosity: How criminals perceive criminal deterrence.”<\/div>\n
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What was your\u00a0initial investigative question?<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Initially I just wanted to look at how criminals respond to law enforcement. Econ\u00a0teaches that people respond to incentives, and that they make decisions to maximize utility. I just wanted to look at how those concepts could be applied to analyzing how criminals make decisions to commit crimes in the face of law enforcement and punishment policies, because obviously that has an effect on the probabilities of success, failure, expected utilities, payoffs stuff like that.<\/div>\n
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Can you give us an applied example of this kind of theory?<\/strong><\/div>\n
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So for example you have the\u00a0concept of expected utility, which takes into account your probability of success\u00a0and therefore also your probability of failure, the expected costs in carrying out the activity, and the expected benefits. Or perceived, you can use the word perceived instead of expected too. So say you have the decision to shoplift, you have your expected benefit which is whatever value you place on stealing, plus the intrinsic value which is the experience of stealing it, because some people just think that stealing stuff is fun. So you have that benefit, the value of what you’re stealing plus the experience of stealing, but you also have the possible cost of being caught and whatever that is, like maybe you pay a fine, maybe you actually go into\u00a0custody. And then you have your probabilities\u00a0and there\u2019s no real way to put a real number on that because you never know exactly what the chances of you\u00a0succeeding\u00a0in the act is but you can develop some idea in your head like, \u201cI think that there\u2019s\u00a0a 90% chance I\u2019ll get away with stealing this,\u201d so you decide to do it. Or maybe 90% isn\u2019t high enough for you so you decide not to do it. It\u2019s just using all those\u00a0probabilities\u00a0and costs and benefits in order to form a decision, at least that\u2019s what you learn in microeconomic theory.<\/div>\n
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What inspired your interest for this topic?\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
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So it\u2019s actually long and contrived. I did summer research on the issue of crime, because I needed a summer job and applied for\u00a0summer research because it would pay\u00a0me well and it would allow me to stay around here and hang out with my friends. I decided on the topic\u00a0of crime\u00a0specifically\u00a0because it\u2019s just kind of an interest I\u2019ve had for my entire life essentially, like I wasn\u2019t terribly exposed to crime growing up but I had\u00a0some what of a decent amount of exposure to crime growing up. I always liked crime movies\u00a0and\u00a0I liked to play Grand Theft Auto a lot. So just had this long interest in crime growing up and through my experience as an economics major I just wanted to apply the economic concepts to crime because I feel like there\u2019s a pretty big economic side to it. Actually in my opinion it\u2019s very largely an economics question, like you have the criminal who decides to execute crimes, which goes back to the microeconomic theory of expected utility that I mentioned, and then you have law enforcement which is trying to keep people from committing crimes and it\u2019s all economic. Well it\u2019s not all economic but it\u2019s largely economic. Like why do people decide commit crime, \u00a0it\u2019s to maximize what they\u00a0perceive\u00a0to be their well being, like whether they desperately need money or they really think it\u2019s fun or something\u00a0like that. On the side of law enforcement they have a large incentive to mitigate crime because incarceration is costly, going through all the courts, prosecution, the actual incarceration. To keep one person incarcerated for an entire year it costs over a million dollars, to feed them, to put them up, to maintain facilities and a whole bunch of stuff. So there\u2019s a large incentive to mitigate crime and there\u2019s a large economic incentive for criminals to actual commit crimes, so on both sides it\u2019s largely an economics question. As an econ major who already had this interest in crime, I just decided to tackle it from an economics perspective.<\/div>\n
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You mentioned you did summer research, could you tell us a little bit about that?<\/strong><\/div>\n
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For my summer research project I looked at juvenile criminal incentives, because to me there\u2019s a pretty large difference between a decision made by an adolescent and a decision made by an adult and it becomes even more\u00a0different when\u00a0you\u2019re talking about carrying out illegal activity. Like when you look at it from a\u00a0psychological or neurological or even\u00a0sociological\u00a0or even an economical perspective, a juvenile reacts to a different set of incentives than an adult does, so I just figured it would be interesting to look at the issue of juvenile crime specifically because at this point in my life I\u2019m still kind of making the transition from an\u00a0adolescent\u00a0to an adult. Well I like to think I\u2019m an adult but I\u2019m still kind of growing up myself. It was just kind of an interesting topic to look at.<\/div>\n
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What kind of advice do you have for the upcoming thesis candidates?<\/strong><\/div>\n
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My best advice would be to choose a topic that you find\u00a0intrinsically\u00a0satisfying, something you find a deep interest in. Don\u2019t look for, or don\u2019t try to do it on a topic that will get you employed after graduation because for me in instance, I never envisioned myself when I started doing all this crime research, which was about a year ago\u00a0already, I never thought about going into it as a career, I just thought it was an interesting way to apply my econ knowledge, but now I figure it\u2019s\u00a0something\u00a0I am going to be doing after graduation. I\u2019ve already applied to grad\u00a0school programs in criminal justice and have an interview next week for that. I just got back from one in Boston this past week actually. My advice would be just choose something you find intrinsically interesting, instead of something that will get you a job. Chances are if you pick something that is really interesting you\u2019ll do really well in it and you\u2019ll set yourself up better to get a job over if you just chose something that doesn\u2019t really interest\u00a0you but you thought would get you a job. If I was just looking out for my job interests I would\u00a0have tried to do something more actuarial or something like that because I have a pretty strong math\u00a0background\u00a0as well, but if I did something accounting or actuary based, [my thesis] probably would have been pretty mediocre because I didn\u2019t\u00a0care about it\u00a0and it wouldn\u2019t have set me up as nearly as well as my crime project. Just choose something you\u00a0actually find interesting verses what you think employers are going to find interesting.<\/div>\n
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Thanks for the insight and wisdom Kenji, come back next week for another thesis!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome back readers!\u00a0This week on Thesis Corner we have another interview for you, but first have you heard about the PIE Conference happening on campus this weekend? Economics department professor Lisa Nunn\u00a0will be one of the speakers tomorrow, along with many other campus voices about what frames their worlds. Check it out on\u00a0Facebook. Also, if you\u2019re\u00a0an Economics student, we will be having Social Hour this afternoon from 4-6pm at Engine\u00a0House No.\u00a09. The\u00a0department will provide the\u00a0appetizers\u00a0and conversation, all you need to do is show up! Now, here\u2019s Kenji Sekino and his thesis on crime economics,\u00a0“When Contempt Causes\u00a0Animosity: How criminals perceive criminal Continue reading Thesis Corner | Kenji Sekino<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[263,264,265,266,255],"class_list":["post-1417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-crime","tag-crime-economics","tag-kenji-sekino","tag-senior-thesis","tag-thesis-corner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1420,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions\/1420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}