Immigration and Crime

There is an interesting papers in the American Law and Economics Review on this topic. The abstract:

What is the Contribution of Mexican Immigration to U.S. Crime Rates? Evidence from Rainfall Shocks in Mexico 

This paper identifies a causal effect of Mexican immigration on crime using an instru- ment that leverages temporal variation in rainfall in different regions in Mexico as well as persistence in regional Mexico–U.S. migration networks. The intuition behind the instrument is that deviations in Mexican weather patterns isolate quasi-random varia- tion in the assignment of Mexican immigrants to U.S. cities. My findings indicate that Mexican immigration is associated with no appreciable change in the rates of either violent or property crimes in U.S. cities.

And from the conclusions (p. 264)

These results are broadly consistent with those in the extant literature, which has tended to report either null or weakly negative effects of immigration on crime. The estimates are also broadly consistent with the empirical regularity that changes in the demographic composition of cities tend to only weakly predict changes in crime, conditional on fixed effects.

Remittances and the Impact on Crime in Mexico

From a paper by Steve Brito, Ana Corbacho, & René Osorio 

This working paper studies the effect of remittances from the United States on crime rates in Mexico. The topic is examined using municipal-level data on the percent of household receiving remittances and homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Remittances are found to be associated with a decrease in homicide rates. Every 1 percent increase in the number of households receiving remittances reduces the homicide rate by 0.05 percent. Other types of crimes are analyzed, revealing a reduction in street robbery of 0.19 percent for every 1 percent increase in households receiving remittances. This decrease is also observed using a state- level panel in another specification. The mechanisms of transmission could be related to an income effect or an incapacitation effect of remittances increasing education, opening job opportunities, and/or reducing the amount of time available to engage in criminal activities. 

The authors add in the conclusions

We use municipal-level data for Mexico in 2010. Two major concerns rise in evaluating this impact: first, the presence of endogeneity between remittances and homicides originated by reverse causality and omitted factors, and second, violence related to drug trafficking. To address the first issue, we use the instrumental variable approach to deal with the endogeneity of remittances. The fact that early migration to the United States from Mexico is correlated with the historic railroad network allowed us to use the distance of each municipality to the U.S. border along the railroad network in 1920 as an instrument. With respect to the second concern, we use as a control the number of drug cartels in every municipality to separate out the effect of drug trafficking. With data on drug-related homicides, we group the municipalities in quintiles and estimate the impact of remittances controlling for these groups. Finally, we subtract drug-related homicides from total homicides to eliminate the effect of these criminals groups. p. 26-27. 

HT: Eve-Angeline Lambert 

2 Research Links

The graphs are from paper No. 1 below, from data of Lambeth, London. 

1. Crime and the Depenalization of Cannabis Possession: Evidence from a Policing Experiment. Draft. 
2. Does Grief Transfer Across Generations? In-Utero Deaths and Child Outcomes. Draft. 

Immigration and Crime: Evidence from Canada

Wikimedia Commons

There is fear of immigrants becoming criminals. But the evidence is controversial. Immigration might actually reduce crime because immigrants are in general law-abiding. In fact "immigrants are underrepresented in in the prison population in Canada" (p. 25). 

This paper by Haimin Zhang (see also here) at the University of British Columbia finds that actually immigration reduces crime, and considers short term and long term effects -- for instance the effect of immigration four years in the past on crime rates today. She argues: "as immigrants stay in Canada longer, their crime reduction effect gets larger" (p. 17). Haimin finds that "compared with the native population, immigrants are better educated, older, more likely to be married, and more likely to reside in metropolitan areas." One of the good things about this study is that, in addition to everything else, it examines cultural factors that might explain reductions in crime rates. For example immigrants might tend to underreport crimes. There is some of that but the magnitude is not large. 

There are many statistical - econometrics - challenges in this type of work. For example more immigrants might reduce crime, but also regions affected by less crime might attract more immigrants. "On the other hand, areas with high crime rates might have lower housing prices and therefore attract immigrants with few financial resources" (p. 26). In other words there is a reverse causality. There might also be endogeneity, meaning that there are other factors that reduce crime and increase immigration at the same time, for example good municipal policies. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method does not deal well with those problems and other methods are necessary, such as instrumental variables, which is what the author does in the paper. Zhang explains: To address these issues I use an instrumental variable strategy introduced by Card [2001]: "it is based on the observation that new immigrants tend to settle in areas where their families and friends are."

Some findings:

This study finds that new immigrants do not have a significant impact on property crime rates, but as they stay longer, more established immigrants actually decrease property crime rates significantly. 

. . . with time spent in Canada, a 10% increase in the recent-immigrant share or established-immigrant share decreases the property crime rate by 2% to 3%. 

Finally in the conclusions she explains:

This paper rules out the possibility that immigrants simply do not report to police when crime happens. Similarly, it finds that dilution of the criminal pool by the addition of law-abiding immigrants can not fully explain the size of the estimates. Therefore, the paper concludes that immigration has a spillover effect, such as changing the neighbourhood characteristics and affecting the behaviour of the native population, reducing crime rates in the long run.

Zhang suggests some questions for future research (p. 26-27):

Does immigration reduce crime by affecting labour market outcomes?  

Do immigrants settle in lower income communities and revitalize them? 

Is it possible that the spill over effect operates through family ties and affects second-generation immigrants?

I wonder if crime increases in sending countries as a result of outmigration, or if crime also decreases when migrants move across developing countries. 
I enjoyed reading Zhang's paper.

Entertainment as Crime Prevention: Evidence from Chicago Sports Games

Algunos estudios han encontrado que ciertos eventos deportivos están correlacionados con incrementos en niveles de violencia, sobro todo doméstica. Un nuevo estudio encuentra que cuando se transmiten eventos deportivos el crimen disminuye, el estudio se hizo en Chicago. Muy probablemente algo similar pasa con la violencia y/o el crimen en América Latina durante el mundial de fútbol. Una implicación es que al menos cierto tipo de crimen se hace con propósitos recreativos. 

The concern that mass media may be responsible for aggressive and criminal behavior is widespread. Comparatively little consideration has been given to its potential diversionary function. This paper contributes to the emerging body of literature on entertainment as a determinant of crime by analyzing Chicago by-the-minute crime reports during major sporting events. Sports provide an exogenous infusion of TV diversion that we leverage to test the effect of entertainment on crime. Because the scheduling of a sporting event should be random with respect to crime within a given month, day of the week, and time, we use month-time-day-of-week fixed effects to estimate the effect of the sporting events on crime. We compare crime reports by the half hour when Chicago’s NFL, NBA, or MLB teams are playing to crime reports at the same time, day, and month when the teams are not playing. We conduct the same analysis for the Super Bowl, NBA Finals, and MLB World Series. The Super Bowl generates the most dramatic declines: total crime reports decrease by approximately 25 percent (roughly 60 fewer crimes). The decline is partially offset by an increase in crime before the game, most notably in drug and prostitution reports, and an uptick in reports of violent crime immediately after the game. Crime during Chicago Bears Monday night football games is roughly 15 percent lower (30 fewer crimes) than during the same time on non-game nights. Our results show similar but smaller effects for NBA and MLB games. Except for the Super Bowl, we find little evidence for temporal crime displacement before or after the games. In general, we find substantial declines during games across crime types – property, violent, drug, and other – with the largest reductions for drug crime. We believe fewer potential offenders on the streets largely explain the declines in crime.

The paper is by Games Ryan Copus & Hannah Laqueur. 

Economic growth reduces crime against small and medium sized enterprises in developing countries

Asif Islam in a paper that examines the link between economic growth and crime against firms in developing countries (Feb 2014): 

This paper contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between economic growth and crime against firms, a fairly under-researched area especially with regards to small and medium sized firms. The paper finds a negative relationship between firm losses due to crime and economic growth. We find that an increase in real GDP per capita growth by 1 percent is associated with a 0.30 percent reduction in the losses due to crime as a percentage of total sales experienced by firms. This figure is larger for small and medium firms (0.33 percent) than larger firms (0.21 percent). The suggested mechanism for this effect is that economic growth increases opportunities elsewhere and thus increasing the opportunity cost of crime. Furthermore, economic growth may result in small and medium firms growing faster and increasing performance, thus allowing them to better protect themselves from criminal activity. The results of this study are consistent with the literature that finds similar beneficial effects of economic growth on crime experienced by households.

HT: Jacob A. Jordaan

Lost in the Mail: A Field Experiment on Crime (Peru)

From a paper by Marco Castillo, Ragan Petrie, Maximo Torero, & Angelino Viceisza  

Stealing, shirking, and opportunistic behavior in general can create barriers to the development of markets. The costs associated with such behavior are shared by both firms and individuals and can be large enough to even prevent the initiation of trade. Measurement of these costs is difficult because information is not available for transactions that fail to occur. We use a field experiment to identify opportunistic crime in a task that is important and relevant for trade: the delivery of mail. We subtly manipulate the content and information available in mail sent to households across neighborhoods that vary by income, and detected high levels of shirking and stealing. Eighteen percent of the mail never arrived at its destination, and significantly more was lost if there was even a slight hint of something additional inside the envelope. Our results demonstrate the importance of transaction costs created by crime and that not all populations are equally affected. Middle-income neighborhoods suffer the most.

From the conclusions in the draft (p. 24-25):

Using a simple and novel field experiment that opens the door for opportunistic behavior, we examine strategy and crime in the mail sector in Lima, Peru. We hypothesize that the very nature of mail delivery gives an opportunity to those who handle the mail to “lose” mail if it is beneficial to do so. Our design allows us to differentiate poor service from targeted crime and to investigate what information is pertinent to committing crimes and who suffers the most from it. 

We have several key findings. First, loss rates are very high. Over 18% of all mail sent never arrived at its destination. These rates are huge and would imply large barriers for the development of trade. Second, these loss rates are partially explained by poor service but not completely. Envelopes containing money were 50% more likely to be lost than those without money. So, mail loss is not random and hints at strategic behavior. Third, when the sender’s last name matched the recipient’s last name, the mail was almost twice as likely to be lost if it contained money. Clearly, those who handle the mail are looking for clues that might suggest that an envelope holds something of value. Fourth, middle-income neighborhoods suffer the highest loss rates and high-income neighborhoods suffer the lowest. This result (and the previous) lends support for the crime occurring in Peru rather than the U.S. since it would require the U.S. Postal Service to know which neighborhoods were rich or poor.

Auto Theft: The Case of Lojack (Mexico)

Understanding the degree of geographical crime displacement is crucial for the design of crime prevention policies. This paper documents changes in automobile theft risk that were generated by the plausibly exogenous introduction of Lojack, a highly effective stolen vehicle recovery device, into a number of new Ford car models in some Mexican states, but not others. Lojack-equipped vehicles in Lojack-coverage states experienced a 48 percent reduction in theft risk due to deterrence effects. However, 18 percent of the reduction in thefts was displaced toward unprotected Lojack models in non-Lojack states, providing new evidence of geographical crime displacement in auto theft.

That is from this paper. A draft is here.  

What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature

The graph is from this paper by Melissa Dell Benjamin F. Jones Benjamin A. Olken. An interesting paragraph on the climate-crime link

A small number of rigorous panel studies relate weather fluctuations to crime. Using a fixed effects panel specification, Jacob, Lefgren and Moretti (2007) find that higher temperatures in a given week increase both violent and property crime in the U.S. during that week, whereas higher precipitation reduces violent crime but has no impact on property crime. Using a 50-year panel of monthly crime and weather data for nearly 3,000 U.S. counties, Ranson (2012) also finds that increased temperatures lead to increased criminal activity. He finds roughly linear positive effects of temperature on violent crimes. For property crimes, he finds that very cold days (below 40 degrees F) reduce property crimes, but very hot days do not increase them. Together, these studies and the evidence discussed above suggest that weather has an immediate effect upon criminal activity, particularly for violent crime. Some researchers have argued for a biological pathway through which temperature affects serotonin neurotransmission in the brain, influencing impulsivity and aggression (see for example Tiihonen, Räsänen, and Hakko 1997), but this hypothesis remains controversial (see, for example, Maes et al. 1993). Whether the temperature-aggression nexus occurs via neurological or social-psychological channels remains an important area of research in criminology, and studying potential linkages between aggression mechanisms and broader social conflict (Section 3.7) is an interesting subject for further research. 

Price System, Traffic Congestion, and Crime

Traffic is bad and getting worse in cities around the world, with some exceptions. Many economists propose charging a fee to drive a car in certain roads and times. The benefits are obvious, a price will make driving more expensive and less cars will be circulating. People on average will spend less time in traffic. That is pretty straight forward. The idea is to reduce congestion costs that we impose on others because of the traffic we all create. 

Contrary to what we might expect charging a fee might also reduce inequality. The money that is collected can be used to improve public transportation and security, which could lead to less crime. In dangerous cities in Latin America that can be very helpful. 

Source: http://cambiociudaddeguatemala.blogspot.com/

In Guatemala City thieves on motorcycles take advantage of heavy traffic to rob car occupants, and sometimes robbers kill the victims. Robbers look especially for cellphones which can be easily resold in a secondary market. 

Reform in Police Activity and Crime (Israel)

From a paper by Itai Ater, Yehonatan Givati, and Oren Rigbi 

We examine the consequences of an organizational reform in Israel that transferred the responsibility for housing arrestees from the Police to the Prison Authority. Using the staggered introduction of the reform in different regions of the country, we document strong evidence that this organizational change led to an increase of 11 percent in the number of arrests and to a decrease of 4 percent in the number of reported crimes, with these effects concentrated in more minor crimes. The reform also led to a decrease in the quality of arrests, measured by the likelihood of being charged following an arrest. These findings are consistent with the idea that the reform externalized the cost of housing arrestees from the Police's perspective, and therefore led the Police to increase its activity against crime.

The authors explain

During the years 2007 and 2008 Israel undertook a large reform in the handling of arrestees and the management of jails. Prior to the reform, the Police was responsible for the transportation and the housing of arrestees. Arrestees were detained either in police stations or in jails that the Police operated and controlled. The Police was also responsible for transporting arrestees from jails to courts and back. When suspects were convicted, they were moved to prisons, which are controlled by the Prison Authority. Under the new arrangement, the Police was no longer responsible for housing arrestees or transporting them. Jail facilities were handed over ”as is” to the Prison Authority, and arrestees were no longer detained at police stations (except for a few hours). Twice a day, the Prison Authority’s transportation unit would pick up new arrestees from police stations and take them to jails or to courts. P. 6.

In general the reform has increased efficiency by allowing the police to focus more on crime persecution, and prison authorities on the management of arrests. The case shows that within the government  it is possible to pursue more actively division of labor an especialization. In the conclusions the authors talk about other areas where that kind of reform can be implemented, such as hospitals. 

Cooperation in criminal organizations: Kinship and violence as credible commitments

The paper argues that kinship ties and sharing information on violent acts can be interpreted as forms of ‘hostage-taking’ likely to increase cooperation among co-offenders. The paper tests this hypothesis among members of two criminal groups, a Camorra clan based just outside Naples, and a Russian Mafia group that moved to Rome in the mid-1990s. The data consist of the transcripts of phone intercepts conducted on both groups by the Italian police over several months. After turning the data into a series of network matrices, we use Multivariate Quadratic Assignment Procedure to test the hypothesis. We conclude that the likelihood of cooperation is higher among members who have shared information about violent acts. Violence has a stronger effect than kinship in predicting tie formation and thus cooperation. When non-kinship-based mechanisms fostering cooperation exist, criminal groups are likely to resort to them.

The authors give a good explanation of different methods used to promote cooperation among co-ofenders. The paper is by Paolo Campana & Federico Varese. I found a pdf via google but was unable to link to it here. The paper might be relevant for the discussions on high violence in some LA countries. 

Immigration and Crime (England and Wales)

. . . [O]nce controlling for under-reporting and for basic demographic characteristics, even though not statistically significant, the effect of being an immigrant on crime is robustly negative across all model specifications (and statistically significant in some of those specifications).

That is from the new paper by Georgios Papadopoulos (February 2013), "Immigration Status and Criminal Behavior: An Application of Estimators for Under-reported Outcomes using the Crime and Justice Survey." The author argues:

. . . [I]mmigrants may be more risk averse and discount future less heavily. As a result, they might be more responsive to potential punishment and other deterrent factors (Bucher and Piehl, 2007). In addition, not only do immigrants face a higher probability of apprehension, but they are also confronted with the threat of deportation. Finally, coming from poorer countries, they are satisfied even with much lower economic outcomes than natives. 

HT: Mark Lee.  

Criminal path-dependence (Medellin)

We use the census of criminals captured in Medellín between 2000 and 2010 to construct our peer's variables, and find a strong and robust positive effect of the presence of adult criminal neighbors on the probability of becoming criminal.

Source: Medina, Tamayo, Posso (2013). 
HT: Fabio Sabatini. 

Crime and education

This paper aims at disentangling the strong association between human capital and crime by investigating whether crime reduces investment in human capital or whether education reduces criminal activity. Heretofore, we exploit two aspects of the Australian survey data on education and crime we use. First, as the data are obtained from twins, we are able to control for many unobserved characteristics affecting both criminal behaviour and the schooling decisions. Second, as criminal behaviour is measured over different periods of time – prior to and after senior high school completion – we can address the causality between crime and education as well. As early criminal behaviour may affect human capital formation, and human capital may influence criminal behaviour in later stages of life, we follow a two step analysis.

First, we address the effects of early criminal behaviour on educational attainment. The estimates suggest that early criminal behaviour is detrimental to investment in human capital. Within pairs of twins we find that early arrests (before the age of 18) reduce educational attainment with .7 to .9 years and lower the probability of completing senior high school with 20 to 23 percentage points. In addition, the timing of the early arrest matters, arrests at age 13, 14 or 15 are most detrimental for educational attainment. These estimates are found after controlling for conduct disorder and early school performance.

Second, we focus on the effect of human capital on crime. As early criminal activity might be an important confounder, we control for early arrests. The estimates suggest that human capital has a negative effect on crime. Completing senior high school reduces the probability of incarceration with 2 to 3 percentage points. We find similar but statistically insignificant effects on the probability of being arrested since the age of 18 and on the number of arrests. The size of these estimates might be downward biased because of measurement error in schooling. IV- estimates using a second independent measure of schooling suggest that the effect of human capital might be larger. Lochner and Moretti (2004) report IV-estimates of the effect of high school completion on imprisonment of 8 percentage points for blacks and 0.9 for whites.

When combining these findings, it seems that the causality between human capital and crime runs in both directions. Still, the impact of early criminal behaviour on human capital formation dominates the impact of human capital formation on future crime behaviour. Controlling for early arrests and early behaviour problems reduces the estimated effect of human capital on crime to less than one third of the previously estimated association. From this, we conclude that early criminal behaviour explains most of the association between human capital and crime.

The strong detrimental effects of early criminal behaviour become also transparent if we consider the estimated effects of early arrests on all three measures of crime. Early arrests increase the probability of incarceration with 20 percentage points and the probability of being arrested since the age of 18 with 10 percentage points. These effects are much larger than the estimated effects of human capital. For instance, the estimated effect of being arrested before the age of 18 on incarceration is almost ten times higher than the estimated effect of completing high school.

That is from the conclusions of the interesting paper "Why are criminals less educated than non-criminals? Evidence from a cohort of young Australian twins" by Webbink et al., forthcoming in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization (2013). A draft (2008) is here.

Top income shares and crime (the US)

From a new paper by Brzezinski Michal (I did not find the full paper online): 

This article estimates the relationship between income inequality approximated by the top 10% and 1%income shares derived from income tax return data and nine crime categories for the US states between 1979 and 2003. We fail to find a positive relationship between inequality and crime, except for the case of the top 10% share and motor vehicle theft.

Military training and violent crime (Australia)

Combat is the most intense form of military service, but several aspects of the training experience, which explicitly prepares people for violent warfare, are hypothesized to link service to violent crime. Using Australia's Vietnam-era conscription lotteries for identification and criminal court data from Australia's three largest states, we seek to estimate the effect of army training on violent crime. Using various specifications, we find no evidence that military training causes violent crime, and our point estimates are always negative. In our preferred specification (using only non-deployed cohorts), we rule out with 95% confidence any positive violent crime effects larger than 3.6% relative to the mean.

From a new paper by Siminski, Ville, and Paull (January 2013). 

The authros conclude:

Our results have caveats and thus may not necessarily apply in other contexts. In particular, the criminal offense data only cover the study population’s middle-age years. While young males have higher crime rates, we believe that our estimates are precise enough to be meaningful. Nevertheless, we cannot test for crime effects that occur shortly after army service. However, we can rule out any substantial ‘permanent’ effects.

Of course these results are also contingent on the specific context of Australian conscript training. It took place for a period of two years at most, and among men who were mainly 20 years of age when they enlisted. Training involved character shaping with positive as well as potentially negative elements. Training skills were wide, varied, and often unrelated to acts of combat. Even among those not deployed to Vietnam, recruits were prepared for a war of covert counter-insurgency rather than for large scale battles. This training may have been less realistic or desensitizing than in the US, because live rounds and ‘Quick Kill’ training techniques were not used. Australian training also included ‘softer’ pacification skills, motivated by the need for close cooperation with Vietnamese civilians in Australia’s role in the war.

Rainfall and crime (India)

We examine the effects of rainfall shocks on various the incidence of crime in India from the years 1971-2000. We find that the incidence of most crimes increases with negative rainfall shocks. Positive rainfall shocks, in contrast, lead to increases in property crimes, but have no effect on non-property crimes. These findings are consistent with economic models of crime emphasizing both opportunity costs and returns.

From a new paper by Blakeslee & Fishman (January 2013). The literature review includes other studies with similar results. 

Alcohol and crime (NYC)

The results show that between the years of 1983 and 2002, controlling for the impact of arrests, police, the minimum wage, the number of the AFDC cases [Aid to Families with Dependent Children], and the size of the population ages 15 to 49, an increase in alcohol consumption has a positive impact on assaults, rapes and grand larcenies, but alcohol has no impact on murders, robberies, burglaries and motor-vehicle thefts. On the other hand, murder arrests deter murders, robbery arrests deter robberies. Similarly, an increase in own-arrests generate reduction in burglaries, motor-vehicle thefts and grand larcenies. The magnitude of the impact of arrests, in terms of elasticities, are greater than the impact of alcohol, except for rape and assault. P. 20. 

From a new paper by Corman & Mocan (January 2013). The title is "Alcohol Consumption, Deterrence and Crime in New York City." 

You should see figure 1 in page 24. 

School Shootings and Private School Enrollment

We find that school shootings are followed by a 10%–12% increase in private high school enrollment. The effects are most pronounced following shootings in nonurban areas, which is consistent with their more intense media coverage.

That is the abstract of a new published paper by Abouk & Adams (Economic Letters, February 2013).

A draft of the paper is here.