Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Listening to a presentation of Leigh Linden and Jonah Rockoff’s, “There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan’s Laws”, I thought of an idea for a commercial website. Some states have sites where you can look up an address and see how many child molesters live nearby. Sometimes the requirement for an ex-con to register ends after a certain number of years. A new private website could harvest the state data, or simply get it by Freedom-of-Info Act and keep it up forever. Information on other crimes committed by neighbors could also be included. The site could be funded by advertising directed at people buying new homes.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Economics, Law, Social Reg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.