Odd Lots

It's almost a truism that better-educated people earn more money. But suppose you're not interested in a normal job? What if you want to go into the mafia? Well, it turns out that you should still stay in school. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Giovanni Mastrobuoni about the relationship between salary and educational attainment in organized crime. He's the co-author of a paper titled "Returns to Education in Criminal Organizations: Did Going to College Help Michael Corleone?" Based on data sets from the first half of the 20th century, Mastrobuoni and his colleagues were able to show that mafia members who got more education also got paid more in the underworld. We discuss how they discovered this, and what it means for the economics of education.