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IZA Discussion Paper No. 15520
August 2022
Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location

published in: American Economic Journal : Applied Economics, 2024, 16 (4), 144 - 160

We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price movements on the international market for gold exogenously affect the expected gains from burgling these households, which become relatively more lucrative targets as the gold price increases. Using a neighbourhood-level panel on reported crime and difference-in-differences, we find that burglaries in South Asian neighbourhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighbourhoods in the same municipality, confirming that burglars react rationally to variations in the expected returns to their activities. We conduct a battery of tests on neighbourhood and individual data to eliminate alternative explanations.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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