Macro-historical Influences, Cohort Dynamics, and the (in)Stability of the Age-Crime Distribution: The Case of the Republic of Korea

The analysis involves age-specific arrest data from 1979 to 2019 in Korea, administered by the Supreme Prosecutor's Office of Korea (SPOK). For the years prior to 2014, we utilized publicly available age-grouped arrest data, which consisted of a mix of 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year brackets. We applied osculatory interpolation techniques to disaggregate these age-grouped data and rearrange the age groups to align with our selected birth cohorts. For the years 2014–2019, we obtained 1-year age-specific arrest data from the Supreme Prosecutor's Office of Korea through a request made to the Open Data Mediation Committee for research purposes (For more details on the request process, please visit https://www.data.go.kr/en/index.do). However, we do not have permission to redistribute this data. Consequently, the data file does not contain the age-specific arrest data used in our analysis. Nonetheless, it will illustrate how we structured our age-period-cohort data, along with the population data used for analysis. The Stata do-file provided will demonstrate the codes we used for the analysis. Please do not hesitate to contact the corresponding author with any questions or if you find any errors in our data and code.