We know how hard it is to settle on a name for your little boy.

You want something original. After all, you’re not giving birth to just anybody, are you?

On the other hand, consider this: A couple of economists reported in Social Science Quarterly this week that there’s a link between having an unpopular name and ending up in trouble as a teen boy.

To figure this out, Shippensburg University economics professors David Kalist and Daniel Lee (both of whom, it must be noted, have very popular names) gathered up four years’ worth of boy names (15,000 in all) from one state’s birth records and compared them with the first names of about half of that state’s juvenile delinquent males born in those years. They found the more unpopular the name, the more likely it was to be associated with kids who ended up with substantiated charges in the juvenile justice system.

Kalist and Lee take pains to point out that simply having an unusual name is not going to lead to a boyhood of crime. “It is not that the name is causing the crime,” Kalist said.

Instead, he said, it looks like troubled families — the kind that tend to raise troubled kids who end up in the juvenile justice system — also tend to give those kids unusual names.

So go ahead and name your boy Rocky (No. 914 on the Social Security Administration’s list of 1000 popular names for 2007), Bentley (No. 990) or Blaze (No. 876). Your family’s solid, right?