Has the rise in youth crime since the 1970s been, in part, a result of falling wages for the unskilled? A new study, which is bound to raise controversy, answers "yes."

Economist Jeff Grogger argues that the study "raises the possibility that the rise in youth crime over the past two decades may have resulted, at least in part, from the decline in real wages." The study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Here are a few of the findings:

• The number of those in prison -- the vast majority of whom are men under the age of 34 -- has risen from 200,000 in 1970 to more than a million today.

• While wages for skilled workers began rising in the late 1970s, real wages plummeted for young men, who tend to be low-skilled.

• Since the mid-70s, real wages for full-time male workers 16 to 24 years of age have dropped more than 20 percent.

• According to the FBI, between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, property-crime arrest rates for males 16 to 24 years old rose 18 percent.

Grogger contends that a 10 percent increase in wages could reduce the criminal participation rate by 1.8 percentage points.

Earlier studies had demonstrated that young black males made wage gains relative to whites from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. But then the trend reversed.

Some economists put the blame on slow growth in productivity. If it had grown at an average annual rate of 3 percent between 1973 and 1993, rather than its actual 1.1 percent average annual rate, typical male high school graduates would have been making an average entry-level wage of $37,603 rather than the actual $20,820 -- in 1993 dollars. That's a gain of more than $16,000.

Source: Perspective, "Crime and the New Economy," Investor's Business Daily, May 19, 1997.