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I4R Discussion Paper Series #301

2026

Wim Bernasco, Asier Moneva, Wouter Steenbeek

A comment on "Discontinuities in the age-victimisation profile and the determinants of victimisation"

Bindler et al. (2024) examine whether, and to what extent, rights granted at ages 16 and 18, mainly access to drugs and motor vehicles, affect victimization rates at these age thresholds. In this replication report we identify five main claims from their abstract. We assess the extent to which these claims are computationally reproducible. For four of the claims we assess, in addition to robustness checks reported by Bindler et al. themselves, whether they are empirically robust against variations in offence definitions. Regarding computational reproducibility, we find that the replication package provided by the authors, together with data from Statistics Netherlands, allows us to reproduce the original findings with an almost perfect precision. Regarding our robustness checks, our results show that two of the main claims are supported, while the two other claims are most strongly supported for property offences and do not hold uniformly across other offence types. Taken together, we evaluate the original paper’s findings as highly reproducible and largely, though not uniformly, robust to plausible changes in the dependent variable.