STREET CRIME AND STREET CULTURE*

A model shows how reputation concerns can support widespread street crime, a street culture, where the direct incentives for such behavior are weak. There are social benefits to street reputations, but those benefits are dominated when reputation concerns draw into crime those who obtain no direct gain from it. The model matches facts about violent crime that a standard model cannot easily explain including low monetary returns, disproportionate victimization of the young and poor, and high variance in rates across small distances. The model generates novel implications for policy and social science, including a negative effect of social capital.     

VIDEO GAMES AND CRIME

Psychological studies find that video game play is associated with markers for violent and antisocial attitudes. It is plausible that these markers indicate either whetted or sated preferences for antisocial behavior. I investigate whether a proxy for video gaming is associated with the prevalence of various crimes and find evidence that gaming is associated with significant declines in crime and death rates. These results are robust to various alternative specifications. Other youth‐related leisure activities—sports and movie viewing—generate smaller or no effects. These results cast doubt on the desirability of proposed restrictions on video game marketing. (JEL L86, D18, I18)     

CRIMINAL PERCEPTIONS AND VIOLENT CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION

This paper explores the relationship between various measures of prior victimization and indicators of both the perceived victimization risk and fear of crime. Equations are specified and estimated both for the fear of crime/perception of risk and for prior victimization. Since prior victimizations are exogenous to the determination of the current assessment of risk or fear of crime, it is possible to isolate the independent effects of victimization and extraneous factors, like racial neighborhood composition, in a recursive model structure. The analysis also examines the contribution that individual victimization and extraneous factors make to the overall gap between average victimization rates and average indicators of fear.
Prior victimization explains some of the rather enormous perception of future victimization, but a sizable gap between perceived risk and actual risk remains. Much of that gap appears to be related to proximity to nonwhites, a possible proxy for racial prejudices and beliefs that nonwhite neighborhoods contribute to heightened crime.     

Determinants of violent and property crimes in England and Wales: a panel data analysis

We examine various determinants of property and violent crimes by using police force area level (PFA) data on England and Wales over the period of 1992–2008. Our list of potential determinants includes two law enforcement variables namely crime-specific detection rate and prison population, and various socio-economic variables such as unemployment rate, real earnings, proportion of young people and the Gini Coefficient. By adopting a fixed effect dynamic GMM estimation methodology we attempt to address the potential bias that arises from the presence of time-invariant unobserved characteristics of a PFA and the endogeneity of several regressors. There is a significant positive effect of own-lagged crime rate. The own-lagged effect is stronger for property crime, on an average, than violent crime. We find that, on an average, higher detection rate and prison population leads to lower property and violent crimes. This is robust to various specifications. However, socio-economic variables with the exception of real earnings play a limited role in explaining different crime types.     

Special issue on forecasting,use of survey data on expectations,and panel data applications: editors’ introduction

This study reinvestigates the relationship between unemployment and crime, but is the first to focus explicitly on the effects of long-term unemployment on crime. A unique finding is that long-term unemployment shows a strong association with violent crime, an effect which is greater than that of total unemployment on property crime in this and most previous studies. Long-term unemployment thus identifies a marginal group for committing crime (particularly violent crime) better than total unemployment, with the duration of unemployment plausibly increasing the strain that fosters violent behaviour.     

Sources of crime in the state of Veracruz: The role of female labor force participation and wage inequality

Abstract

In recent years, crime has become a serious concern in Mexico as its increase has detrimentally affected government institutions and economic growth. There is considerable speculation among policy analysts about the causes of the increase in crime. Whereas some analysts attribute the increase to a rise in income inequality, others believe internal migration and a loss of morals are the roots of criminal behavior. This research shows that at least for the Mexican state of Veracruz, wage inequality and labor force participation have an important impact on crime. When gender is considered, however, the impact is more complicated than it seems. An increase in women's labor force participation decreases the overall number of alleged violent offenders. However, the number of alleged rapists and grievous bodily harm offenders increases as women's wage distribution improves. The results shed light on the gender dimensions of the economics of crime.     

Police Violence and the Underreporting of Crime

This paper examines the relationship between police violence and the reporting of crime. Utilizing original data from a large‐scale household survey conducted in Costa Rica from October 2013 to April 2014 (n = 4,200), we find that the observation of police violence significantly reduces citizens’ willingness to report crime. The implications of this finding are explored using a game‐theoretic model of crime, crime reporting, and police misconduct. The model reveals that although the prospect of police violence against criminals may generate a degree of deterrence for criminal behavior, permissiveness toward police violence also raises expectations about the likelihood of police abuse against law‐abiding citizens. Consistent with our empirics, this reduces citizens’ propensity to report crime, thereby fostering a climate of impunity for criminal activity.     

UNDERSTANDING THE INTERSTATE EXPORT OF CRIME GUNS: A GRAVITY MODEL APPROACH

In 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives successfully traced over 145,000 guns recovered at crime scenes in the United States. Of these guns, more than 43,000 were originally sold in a different state from which they were recovered. What factors may explain the interstate movement of these crime guns? This article uses the well‐known gravity model of international trade to estimate interstate flow of crime guns. Empirical results show that, like trade of goods and services between nations, the traced movement of crime guns between states is proportionate to the economic sizes of trading partners and is inversely proportionate to the distance between them. In addition, the presence of gangs in one or both states tends to increase the flow of crime guns. Finally, differences in state gun laws tend to affect trade flows with crime guns flowing from states with “weak” gun laws to states with “strict” gun laws. (JEL K00, K42)     

Crime during the business cycle: urban–rural differences

Despite the abundant literature on how crime evolves over the business cycle, no consensus has arisen whether crime increases or decreases during recessions. The literature provides both positive and negative associations between the crime rate and the unemployment rate, a commonly used proxy for the business cycle. This study revisits this issue and uses county-level data from 1990 to 2013. It allows for differences as to how unemployment relates to both property crime and violent crime depending on the size of the counties. We find evidence of a positive association between unemployment and property crime that strengthens with county size. The results show the same pattern for violent crime but are statistically weaker. Our findings suggest that the positive association between property crime and unemployment that others have found is largely driven by more populous areas.     

Housing prices and crime perception

In this article, we combine data from the housing market with data from a victimization survey to estimate the effect of crime perception on housing prices in the City of Barcelona from 2004 to 2006. Using dwelling data and a hedonic price model (using both OLS and quantile regressions), in the first stage, we estimate the shadow price of the location of dwellings. In the second stage, we analyse the impact of crime perception, after controlling for other district characteristics such as local public spending and immigration, on this locational valuation. After accounting for the possible endogeneity of crime and housing prices, our findings suggest that crime exerts relevant costs beyond its direct costs. Indeed, a one standard deviation increase in perceived security is associated with a 0.57 % increase in the valuation of districts. Moreover, in districts perceived as being less safe than the average for the City of Barcelona, houses are highly discounted. Less safe districts have on average a valuation that is 1.27 % lower.     

Violent crime and punishment: an application of the LISREL model

Public anxiety over violent crime has forged a broad consensus to purchase more crime control. Recently, the President brought into law a federal anti-crime bill that will put an additional 100 000 police on the nation's streets. This paper presents empirical evidence on the deterrence effect of police presence. The principal finding is that police presence deters commission of violent crimes by increasing the risk of being punished for committing those crimes. This risk is modelled as a latent variable, because the probability and severity of punishment for committing a violent crime are generally communicated in an onconsistant fashion. The violent crime commission rate is also treated as a latent variable, because it is almost certainly afflicted with measurement error.     

Determinants of the long-term yield in Canada: an open economy VAR approach

An assumption of many national drug control policies is the existence of a causal relationship between illegal drug use and violent crime. However, robust empirical findings supporting this relationship are scarce. Alternatively, there is extensive research, much of it in economics, which suggests that there may actually be a stronger causal relationship between drug enforcement/control/prohibition and violent crime than drug use and criminal violence. The paper presents some of the research pertaining to the relationship between illegal drugs and violent crime. In addition, a violent crime model is empirically tested using data from 24 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States to determine the nature and strength of this relationship.     

Central city crime and suburban economic growth

This paper explores the relationship between inner-city crime patterns and suburban income growth, analysing data on 318 US counties for selected metropolitan statistical areas of 32 states within the United States from 1982 to 1997. The findings suggest that violent crime does seem to have a negative impact on close-in suburbs, with a less negative impact farther away from the central city (becoming positive at some point). While results are not as robust as we had hoped they are consistent with flight to further-out suburbs rather than migration to different metropolitan areas in response to urban crime.     

Athletic contests and individual robberies: an analysis based on hourly crime data

Using hourly data on individual robberies, this article employs a novel approach to investigate the relationship between athletic contests and individual robberies in Memphis, Tennessee, a well-known entertainment destination, with its iconic Beale Street locale, in the US. Empirical results indicate that home basketball games hosted by the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and those hosted by the University of Memphis Tigers are associated with increases in individual robberies, while away games are not associated with such an increase. This finding is consistent with the hot spot theory of crime, as large numbers of individuals travel to the games, thus providing additional opportunities for crime.     

CRIME AND LOCAL LABOR MARKET OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOW‐SKILLED WORKERS: EVIDENCE USING JAPANESE PREFECTURAL PANEL DATA

This paper examines the link between crime and labor market opportunities in Japan. To consider this link, we estimate the crime supply function first introduced by Becker using panel data for Japanese prefectures. The main empirical results are as follows. First, we expect that increasing the number of police will reduce crime, regardless of its type (i.e. whether referring to total crime, violent crime or larceny). Second, crime rates are generally lower in prefectures where a low‐skilled individual can find a job more easily. Third, the effects of wages for low‐skilled workers on crime, especially larceny, are significantly negative, whereas average wages in a prefecture do not appear to affect crime. Fourth, the prefectures with lower educational standards are expected to suffer more crime than other prefectures. Finally, prefectures with higher Gini coefficients on schooling years are also expected to suffer more crime than other prefectures.     

The effects of gun control on crimes: a spatial interactive fixed effects approach

This paper examines the effect of right-to-carry laws on crimes. We relax the assumption that unobserved time effects have homogeneous impacts on states; therefore, states with right-to-carry laws may follow different time trends which might be stronger or weaker than those of other states including states with no right-to-carry laws. The heterogeneous time trends are modeled by a factor structure where time factors represent time-varying unobservables, and factor loadings account for their heterogeneous impacts across states. No assumption is imposed on the shape of the time trend. Crime statistics exhibit spatial dependence, and a state’s adoption of right-to-carry law may have external effects on its neighboring states. Using a dynamic spatial panel model with interactive effects, we find positive spatial spillovers in crime rates. Depending on a crime category, an average \(1\%\) reduction in crime rates in neighboring states can decrease crime rates by 0.069–0.287%, with property crimes exhibiting higher degrees of spatial dependence than violent crimes. We find that although the passage of right-to-carry laws has no significant effects on the overall violent or property crime rates, they lead to short-term increases in robbery and medium-term decreases in murder rates. The results are robust to the number of factors, a different sample ending point, and some alternative spatial weights matrices and model specifications.     

The effect of reporting errors on the cross-country relationship between inequality and crime

This paper analyzes reporting errors in crime data to see how they impact econometric estimates, particularly of the key relationship between inequality and crime. Criminal victimization surveys of 140,000 respondents in 37 industrial, transition and developing countries are used. Comparing the crimes experienced by these respondents with those reported to the police, non-random and mean-reverting errors are apparent. Time-varying factors affect the propensity of victims to report crimes to the police, undermining the use of country-specific fixed effects as a means of dealing with measurement error in official crime data. These errors substantially attenuate both cross-sectional and panel estimates of the partial correlation between inequality and crime.     

Are youth offenders responsive to changing sanctions? Evidence from the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act of 2003

This paper examines youth offenders’ responses to changing sanctions, using evidence from the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), which replaced the Young Offenders Act on April 1, 2003. Using police reported and court based official statistics and the difference‐in‐difference strategy, it is found that Canadian youth offenders were less likely to be charged by police and less likely to receive a custodial sentence following the YCJA. These changes were relatively large for less serious crime and small or insignificant for more serious crime. In response to these changes in the certainty of sanctions, less serious youth crime increased while the direction of change for more serious youth crime was less clear. Empirical analysis on youth self‐reported crime corroborates the findings on youth crime reported to police, particularly for boys.     

The effect of reporting errors on the cross-country relationship between inequality and crime

This paper analyzes reporting errors in crime data to see how they impact econometric estimates, particularly of the key relationship between inequality and crime. Criminal victimization surveys of 140,000 respondents in 37 industrial, transition and developing countries are used. Comparing the crimes experienced by these respondents with those reported to the police, non-random and mean-reverting errors are apparent. Time-varying factors affect the propensity of victims to report crimes to the police, undermining the use of country-specific fixed effects as a means of dealing with measurement error in official crime data. These errors substantially attenuate both cross-sectional and panel estimates of the partial correlation between inequality and crime.     

Four factors that explain both the rise and fall of US crime, 1970–2003

Previous research has failed to explain the rise and fall of US crime since 1970. This study uses cointegration, error correction and common long-memory components analyses to demonstrate that four basic crime factors explaining both the increases in US violent and property crime between 1970 and 1991 and the dramatic declines in crime after 1991. The four factors include arrest rates, income per capita, the proportion of criminal-justice resources devoted to drug crime and alcohol consumption. Error correction models and common long-memory factors show an especially close link between crime rates and the percentage of prison resources devoted to drug offenders. Similar factors result in cointegrated models for murder, rape, robbery, assault and larceny. Additional modelling shows that effective abortion rates computed along the lines of Donohue and Levitt (2001 Donohue, JJ and Levitt, SD. 2001. The impact of legalized abortion on crime. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116: 379–420. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) do not help in explaining the rise and fall of US crime.