Bad Times
Skill-biased Technological Change, Earnings of Unskilled Workers, and Crime
Naci Mocan & Bulent Unel
NBER Working Paper, November 2011
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. Following the literature on wage inequality and skill-biased technological change, we employ CPS data to create state-year as well as state-year-and (broad) industry specific measures of skill-biased technological change, which are then used as instruments for unskilled workers' earnings in crime regressions. Regressions that employ state panels reveal that technology-induced variations in unskilled workers' earnings impact property crime with an elasticity of -1, but that wages have no impact on violent crime. The paper also estimates, for the first time in this literature, structural crime equations using micro panel data from NLSY97 and instrumenting real wages of young workers. Using state-year-industry specific technology shocks as instruments yields elasticities that are in the neighborhood of -2 for most types of crime, which is markedly larger than previous estimates. In both data sets there is evidence for asymmetric impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. A decline in earnings has a larger effect on crime in comparison to an increase in earnings by the same absolute value.
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Crime and Unemployment: Evidence from Europe
Duha Altindag
International Review of Law and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
I investigate the impact of unemployment on crime using a country-level panel data set from Europe that contains consistently-measured crime statistics. Unemployment has a positive influence on property crimes. Using earthquakes, industrial accidents and the exchange rate movements as instruments for the unemployment rate, I find that 2SLS point estimates are larger than OLS estimates.
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Abhay Aneja, John Donohue & Alexandria Zhang
American Law and Economics Review, Fall 2011, Pages 565-631
Abstract:
For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public - so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the "more guns, less crime" hypothesis using county-level crime data for the period 1977-2000. Seventeen of the eighteen NRC panel members essentially concluded that the existing research was inadequate to conclude that RTC laws increased or decreased crime. The final member of the panel, though, concluded that the NRC's panel data regressions supported the conclusion that RTC laws decreased murder. We evaluate the NRC evidence and show that, unfortunately, the regression estimates presented in the report appear to be incorrect. We improve and expand on the report's county data analysis by analyzing an additional six years of county data as well as state panel data for the period 1977-2006. While we have considerable sympathy with the NRC's majority view about the difficulty of drawing conclusions from simple panel data models, we disagree with the NRC report's judgment that cluster adjustments to correct for serial correlation are not needed. Our randomization tests show that without such adjustments, the Type 1 error soars to 40-70%. In addition, the conclusion of the dissenting panel member that RTC laws reduce murder has no statistical support. Finally, our article highlights some important questions to consider when using panel data methods to resolve questions of law and policy effectiveness. Although we agree with the NRC's cautious conclusion regarding the effects of RTC laws, we buttress this conclusion by showing how sensitive the estimated impact of RTC laws is to different data periods, the use of state versus county data, particular specifications, and the decision to control for state trends. Overall, the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from both the state and the county panel data models conducted over the entire 1977-2006 period with and without state trends and using three different models is that aggravated assault rises when RTC laws are adopted. For every other crime category, there is little or no indication of any consistent RTC impact on crime. It will be worth exploring whether other methodological approaches and/or additional years of data will confirm the results of this panel data analysis.
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John Nunley, Alan Seals & Joachim Zietz
Journal of Socio-Economics, December 2011, Pages 942-948
Abstract:
Fluctuations in aggregate crime rates contrary to recent shifts in the age distribution of the U.S. population have cast doubt on the predictive power of the age-crime hypothesis. By examining a longer time horizon, back to the early 1930s, we show that the percentage of the young population is a robust predictor of the observed large swings in the U.S. murder rate over time. However, changes in the misery index - the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates - significantly contribute to explaining changes in the murder rate. This applies, in particular, to those changes that are at odds with the long-run trend of the U.S. age distribution, such as the decline in the murder rate in the latter part of the 1970s or its increase starting around the middle of the 1980s.
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The Evolution of Criminal Law and Police during the Pre-modern Era
Douglas Allen & Yoram Barzel
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, October 2011, Pages 540-567
Abstract:
Increased standardization was a by-product of technical innovations during the Industrial Revolution. An unfortunate side effect of standardization was enhanced opportunities for theft and embezzlement. Two significant modern institutions radically evolved during the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries to control these growing problems: criminal law and public police. These institutions strongly interacted with the pace of the Industrial Revolution. Our argument explains this evolution and is tested through an analysis of several historical facts: the role of early police, the fall of the watch system, the creation of improvement commissions, the removal of possession immunity, the rise and fall of factory colonies, and the fall and rise of court cases during the eighteenth century.
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Mechanisms for Eliciting Cooperation in Counterterrorism Policing: Evidence from the United Kingdom
Aziz Huq, Tom Tyler & Stephen Schulhofer
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2011, Pages 728-761
Abstract:
This study examines the effects of counterterrorism policing tactics on public cooperation among Muslim communities in London, U.K. The study reports results of a random-sample survey of 300 closed and fixed response telephone interviews conducted in Greater London's Muslim community in February and March 2010. It tests predictors of cooperation with police acting against terrorism. Specifically, the study provides a quantitative analysis of how perceptions of police efficacy, greater terrorism threat, and the perceived fairness of policing tactics ("procedural justice") predict the willingness to cooperate voluntarily in law enforcement efforts against terrorism. Cooperation is defined to have two elements: a willingness to work with the police in anti-terror efforts, and the willingness to alert police upon becoming aware of a terror-related risk in a community. We find that among British Muslims, both measures of cooperation are better predicted by procedural justice concerns than by perceptions of police efficacy or judgments about the severity of the terrorism threat. Unlike previous studies of policing in the United States, however, we find no correlation between cooperation and judgments about the legitimacy of police; rather, procedural justice judgments influence cooperation directly.
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Community-level impacts of temperature on urban street robbery
Evan Sorg & Ralph Taylor
Journal of Criminal Justice, November-December 2011, Pages 463-470
Purpose: Conduct the first empirical intra-urban examination of community-level connections between street robbery and temperature. Examine whether community socioeconomic status (SES) and crime-relevant land uses strengthen or weaken the temperature impact. A theoretical framework relying on routine activity theory, crime pattern theory, and resident-based control dynamics organized predictions.
Data and methods: For Philadelphia census tracts (n = 381), monthly street robbery counts and temperature data for 36 consecutive months were combined with census and land use data, and analyzed with multilevel models.
Results: Community robbery counts were higher when temperatures were higher, and in lower SES communities. In support of previous work with property crime, but in contrast to previous work with assault, the effects of temperature were stronger in higher SES communities. In support of the integrated model, commercial land use prevalence and subway stations were associated with heightened temperature impacts on robbery.
Conclusions: Community-level fixed and random effects of temperature on urban robbery counts persist when controlling for land use and community structure; further, the random effects depend in part on both. There are implications for understanding indigenous guardianship or informal resident-based place management dynamics, and for planning seasonal police deployments.
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Robert Kane
Social Science & Medicine, December 2011, Pages 1585-1592
Abstract:
The present study tested the relationships between macro-level violence and birthweight in structurally disadvantaged communities in the District of Columbia. The study hypothesized that both rates of violence and violence "uncertainty" (the latter was operationalized as within-census tract residual change scores in violence), should be inversely associated with birthweight among all live singleton births in DC from 2000 to 2002. Using mixed models, the study found that (1) patterns of violence and violence uncertainty were significantly associated with birthweight among mothers residing in structurally disadvantaged communities, and (2) these findings held for Black and Hispanic, but not white, mothers. The study argues that urban ecological researchers should begin to consider not just how rates (or levels) of violence influence health and other social outcomes in communities, but also the effects of violence uncertainty as a source of unpredictable risk and territorial disruption.
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David Weisburd et al.
Journal of Experimental Criminology, December 2011, Pages 297-320
Objectives: To examine the impacts of broken windows policing at crime hot spots on fear of crime, ratings of police legitimacy and reports of collective efficacy among residents of targeted hot spots.
Methods: A block randomized experimental design with a police intervention targeting disorder delivered to 55 treatment street segments with an equal number of segments serving as controls. Main outcomes were measured using a panel survey of 371 persons living or working in these sites.
Results: The broken windows police intervention delivered to crime hot spots in this study had no significant impacts on fear of crime, police legitimacy, collective efficacy, or perceptions of crime or social disorder. Perceptions of physical disorder appear to have been modestly increased in the target areas.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that recent criticisms of hot spots policing approaches which focus on possible negative "backfire" effects for residents of the targeted areas may be overstated. The study shows that residents are not aware of, or much affected by, a three hour per week dosage of aggressive order maintenance policing on their blocks (in addition to routine police responses in these areas). Future research needs to replicate these findings focusing on varied target populations and types of crime hot spots, and examining different styles of hot spots policing.
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The Impact of Juvenile Curfew Laws on Arrests of Youth and Adults
Patrick Kline
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Youth curfew ordinances are a widely touted, yet little studied, policy tool available to local police departments. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of curfew ordinances by comparing the arrest behavior of various age groups within a city before and after curfew enactment. The evidence suggests that curfews are effective at reducing both violent and property crimes committed by juveniles below the statutory curfew age. Arrests of adults and youth above the curfew age also appear to decrease in the wake of curfew enactment; however, these effects are smaller and statistically insignificant.
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The Effects of the Announcement and Opening of Light Rail Transit Stations on Neighborhood Crime
Stephen Billings, Suzanne Leland & David Swindell
Journal of Urban Affairs, December 2011, Pages 549-566
Abstract:
The debate over crime and rail transit focuses on whether such investments "breed" criminal activities with new targets of opportunity or transport crime from the inner city to the suburbs. Yet, little empirical evidence exists on whether new rail transit actually does lead to increased crime rates around stations. In order to study this question, we test the relationship between crime and rail transit with the 2007 opening of the Charlotte light rail line. We use Geographical Information Systems software and micro-level data on reported crimes to generate measures of criminal activity in and around light rail transit (LRT) stations. We then implement a quasi-experimental before-and-after methodology using two alternate transit corridors to control for differences between neighborhoods that contain LRT stations and other neighborhoods. We find light rail does not actually increase crime around stations. Instead, we see a decrease in property crimes once the station locations are announced, which remains relatively stable after the light rail begins operating.