This paper extends previous empirical research on the determinants of aggregate property crime rates in two dimensions. First, we examine the effect of inflation on property crime rates. Then, using a structural time-series approach we show that it is possible to estimate consistently the effects of exogenous macroeconomic variables on aggregate property crime rates without introducing endogeno...

A popular perception is that immigration causes higher crime rates. Yet, historical and contemporary research finds that at the individual level, immigrants are not more inclined to commit crime than the native born. Knowledge of the macro-level relationship between immigration and crime, however, is characterized by important gaps. Most notably, despite the fact that immigration is a macro-lev...

This paper presents an attempt at establishing association between crime levels and prison populations across European countries. We observe that the situation in Central Eastern countries differs distinctly from rest of Europe. Building on this, we offer justification is methodologically based correlations regressions country incarceration rates rates, with reference to governance indicators. ...

This article studies crime rates’ response to economic conditions. Using a longitudinal data set covering about 20 countries over the period 1970-2010, we investigate whether crime rates respond asymmetrically to increases in unemployment and recoveries in economic conditions. We find a positive response of crime rates on variation in unemployment rates, but we do not find compelling evidence o...

The United States in the 1990s has experienced the greatest sustained decline in violent crime rates since World War II—even though rates thus far have not fallen as rapidly as they increased during the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I review a set of exogenous and policy-related explanations for the earlier crime boom and for the crime bust of the 1990s. I argue that our understandin...

This paper analyzes the link between rising city crime rates and urban  ight. Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population. Almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased out-migration rather than a decrease in new arrivals. Households that leave the city because of crime are much more likely to remain within...

Most successful crime prevention efforts take the approach of "designing out crime" through the identification of highly specific crime problems and the development of preventive efforts to reduce them (Clarke, 1992). A study of the design, maintenance and management of "Metro," Washington, DCs subway system, allows for the novel approach of evaluating an effort to design in security at the out...

We estimate the effect of changes in incarceration rates on changes in crime rates using state-level panel data. We develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities. Given that incarceration rates adjust to per...

Motor vehicle theft (MVT) is arguably the most underresearched Part I crime. This work predicts long-term changes in community MVT rates, extrapolating from earlier work in community fabric and changing personal crime and delinquency rates and cross-sectional work on MVT. Police data on MVTs generated MVT rates in one Midwestern city in 1990-1991 and 2000-2001 that were linked with census block...

The fact that the volume of crime is related to the size of a jurisdiction’s population has been well established. The relationship between crime rate and population size, however, is less clear. Crime rate presents crime on a per capita basis, and is intended to adjust for population size so that comparisons can be made. In this article, the author first establishes the statistical relationshi...