Unemployment and Property Crime: Not a Simple Relationship

A bstract . While previous studies on the unemployment-crime hypothesis have yielded equivocal results, here nonsignificant Pearson correlation coefficients were found for theft rates and the percentage of unemployed men and unemployed women for 20 nations. This raises additional cross-cultural questions about the validity both of strain theories that predict positive correlations, and competing theories that predict negative correlations. Implications for research on the unemployment-crime hypothesis are discussed.