Chinese import competition,crime, and government transfers in US

This paper exploits the exogenous rise of Chinese imports in US to investigate the effect of import competition on crime at the county level. The results indicate that counties with high exposure to Chinese import competition have high crime rates. The exposure effect on property crime is much larger than that on violent crime. A one standard deviation increase in exposure causes 32 more violent crimes in the county, while such increase in exposure causes 256 more property crimes. Interestingly, we find that the crime impact of exposure to Chinese import competition becomes smaller in counties with high government transfers.     

Does longer incarceration deter or incapacitate crime? Evidence from Truth-in-Sentencing reform

This article evaluates how Truth-in-Sentencing (TIS) laws impact both violent and property crimes through mandating violent offenders to serve a substantial proportion of sentenced terms before being eligible to release to community supervision. Focusing on states with effective TIS laws, I utilize the difference-in-differences design to investigate the treatment effect of TIS on crime. I observe statistically significant decline in both violent and property crimes in TIS states. A series of placebo tests confirm the robustness of the estimates and inferences. The dynamic impact of TIS is heterogeneous among the seven categories of violent and property crimes in TIS states: murder and robbery rates decline almost immediately after TIS, while property crime takes longer time to exhibit significant decline.     

Crime rates,male youth unemployment and real income in Australia: evidence from Granger causality tests

This article applies Granger causality tests to examine the relationship between seven different categories of property crime and violent crime against the person, male youth unemployment and real male average weekly earnings in Australia from 1964 to 2001 within a cointegration and vector error correction framework. It is found that fraud, homicide and motor vehicle theft are cointegrated with male youth unemployment and real male average weekly earnings. However, there is no evidence of a long-run relationship between either break and enter, robbery, serious assault or stealing with male youth unemployment and real male average weekly earnings.     

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.     

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.     

Examining the link between crime and unemployment: a time-series analysis for Canada

We use national and regional Canadian data to analyse the relationship between economic activity (as reflected by the unemployment rate) and crime rates. Given potential aggregation bias, we disaggregate the crime data and look at the relationship between six different types of crimes rates and unemployment rate; we also disaggregate the data by region. We employ an error correction model in our analysis to test for short-run and long-run dynamics. We find no evidence of long-run relationship between crime and unemployment, when we look at both disaggregation by type of crime and disaggregation by region. Lack of evidence of a long-run relationship indicates we have no evidence of the motivation hypothesis. For selected types of property crimes, we find some evidence of a significant negative short-run relationship between crime and unemployment, lending support to the opportunity hypothesis. Inclusion of control variables in the panel analysis does not alter the findings, qualitatively or quantitatively.     

The Optimal Use of Fines and Imprisonment If Governments Do Not Maximize Welfare

We consider a stylized model of crime and punishment in which the prosecution policy is defined by three variables: the size of punishment, the type of punishment, and the detection probability. We derive the optimal type of punishment under the assumption that the detection probability is chosen by a government whose objective function places a higher weight on the government's budget than the social welfare function does. We show that for serious crimes exclusive imprisonment is welfare maximizing. If costs of imprisonment are taken into account, the optimal punishment is a prison term with an additional fine that is smaller or equal to the costs of the prison term. For less serious crimes, fines without imprisonment are welfare maximizing. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that the standard result of the literature that fines should be used whenever feasible need not hold in the presence of a rent‐seeking government. Moreover, it offers a new explanation for the widespread use of mandatory imprisonment for serious crimes.     

农民工犯罪类别的决定因素——基于监狱调查数据的实证分析

基于监狱调查数据,本文分析了农村户籍服刑人员和普通农民工之间,以及服刑人员内部在个人基本信息、性格特质和家庭背景三个维度上的差异。研究发现农民工罪犯主要参与暴力犯罪和盗窃。与农民工相比,服刑人员总体上年纪小,教育不足,认知能力和性格特征存在缺陷,兄弟姐妹多,母亲教育程度低。区分不同犯罪类型,以上特征多表现在暴力犯和盗窃犯身上;而涉毒犯和经济犯的特征为进城时间长、认知能力强和无差异的年龄及母亲教育程度。     

Does state-level per capita income affect juvenile delinquency? An empirical analysis for Indian states

While average juvenile crime rates across India has dropped in recent decades, juvenile property crime rates (total juvenile crimes divided by state population) has actually gone up from 15% in 2000-01 to about 20% in 2013-14. There is huge variation across states when it comes to juvenile crime rates. The literature on juvenile crime in the Indian context is scant. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by undertaking a comprehensive analysis of juvenile delinquency related to property crimes across Indian states. Results show that state income per capita has a non-linear impact on incidences of juvenile crime across Indian states - rising when the income starts growing for relatively poorer states but increasing at a diminishing rate when state income per capita rises further. When a poor state gets relatively richer, both opportunities to commit crime and returns from property crime increases. However, as the state grows even richer, growth of employment and state facilities including rehabilitation and redistribution, improve. Further, we find that states with the lowest income per capita and highest level of adult crime face the steepest increase in juvenile crime rates for a rise in state income per capita.     

Does private security affect crime?: a test using state regulations as instruments

Private security is employed to deter criminals from attacking specific targets, presumably not to produce general deterrence. Indeed, private security generates negative spillovers as criminals substitute non-protected targets for protected targets. Specific deterrence efforts may generate positive spillovers too, however, by raising the expected cost of committing crimes, thereby reducing crime in an area. The hypothesis that private security deters crime at the state level is tested. The demand for private security in an area is expected to be simultaneously dependent on the level of crime; so, an instrumental variables approach is employed in a panel-data fixed-effect model using state-level data from 1998 to 2010. Instruments for the amount of private security are state-wide licensing regulations for firms specializing in providing security, since these regulations should influence entry. Some state-level measures of violent and property crime are shown to be negatively and significantly related to increases in private security, suggesting that private security generates a general deterrence effect.     

Inequality and criminality revisited: further evidence from Brazil

The objective of this study is to shed light on the determinants of criminality rates in Brazil. A panel data model was estimated using Brazilian states’ data. Our main result suggests that income inequality plays an important role in the determination of the crime rate. Furthermore, there are evidence suggesting that both unemployment and urbanization rates are positively related to crime. Based on a GMM approach we find the existence of an “inertial effect” on criminality. Besides that, the GMM results show that public security spending is effective in reducing criminality rates. Contrary to the common wisdom, we could not find evidence that poverty increases violent crimes. Finally, we have evidence that income inequality Granger causes crime, but not the reverse.     

Crime,apprehension and clearance rates: Panel data evidence from Canadian provinces

The Becker model of crime establishes the importance of the probability of apprehension as a key factor in a rational individual's decision to commit a crime. In this respect, most empirical studies based on US data have relied on variation in the number of police officers to estimate the impact of the probability of apprehension or capture. We measure the probability of apprehension by clearance rates and study their effects on crime rates, employing a panel of Canadian provinces from 1986 to 2005. OLS, GMM, GLS and IV estimates yield statistically significant elasticities of clearance rates, ranging from ?0.2 to ?0.4 for violent crimes and from ?0.5 to ?0.6 for property crimes. These findings reflect the importance of police force crime‐solving productivity.     

Compulsory schooling laws and school crime

Extensive literature demonstrates that compulsory schooling laws improve educational attainment, well-being, civic involvement, and labour market outcomes. However, at-risk youth incapacitated to schools may impact the learning environment and school safety. The purpose of this article is to study whether raising the minimum dropout age (MDA) requirement above 16 increases crime committed within US public high schools. A difference-in-difference estimation exploits changes in state-level MDA laws over time and indicates that schools in states that raise their MDA requirement to 18 incur more overall crime relative to schools in states that do not, while no effect on overall crime is identified when the MDA requirement is raised to 17. Furthermore, these effects persist for 4 years after passage and more intensely in metropolitan areas. Coupling this research with existing literature suggests that when the MDA requirement is raised to 18, only a small portion of the observed reduction in juvenile crime is displaced to schools. Analysis by category of crime reveals schools incur more physical attacks, no change in illegal drug and property crimes, and fewer violent crimes in states that raise their MDA requirement to 18, while illegal drug crimes increase in states that raise their MDA requirement to 17.     

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.     

Does Peacetime Military Service Affect Crime?

Draft lottery data combined with Danish longitudinal administrative records show that military service can reduce criminal activity for youth offenders. For this group, property crime is reduced, and our results indicate that the effect is unlikely to be the result of incapacitation only. We find no effect of military service on violent crime, on educational attainment, or on employment and earnings, either in the short run or in the long run. These results suggest that military service does not upgrade productive human capital directly, but rather affects criminal activity through other channels (e.g., by changing attitudes to criminal activity).     

Unemployment and Crime: Is There a Connection?

A panel of Swedish counties over the years 1988–1999 is used to study the effects of unemployment on property crime rates. The period under study is characterized by turbulence in the labor market—the variation in unemployment rates was unprecedented in the latter part of the century. Hence, the data provide a unique opportunity to examine unemployment effects. According to the theory of economics of crime, increased unemployment rates lead to higher property crime rates. A fixed‐effects model is estimated to investigate this hypothesis. The model includes time‐ and county‐specific effects and a number of economic and socio‐demographic variables to control for unobservables and covariates. The results show that unemployment had a positive and significant effect on some property crimes (burglary, car theft and bike theft).     

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.     

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE DECLINE IN CRIME?*

In this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the United States. We propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: First, the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996. Second, the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability, the stronger economy, and the aging of the population. Third, the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible. Fourth, the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime. Overall, our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century.     

CRIMES BY YOUTH: DETERRENCE AND MORAL COMPLIANCE WITH THE LAW

We use a decision theory framework to evaluate the extent to which crimes by youth are explained by the "economic model of crime." We expand the model from the usual formulation including deterrence effects to investigate the impact of earned income and income supplements on individuals' crime participation. Additionally, we evaluate variables representing the forces of moral compliance and family attitudes. We find that moral compliance has a moderating effect on the decision to commit crimes, even by persistently criminal individuals.