Identifying the Socioeconomic Determinants of Crime in Spanish Provinces

Paolo Buonanno and Daniel Montolio

No 138, Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia

Abstract: In this paper we study, having as theoretical reference the economic model of crime (Becker, 1968; Ehrlich, 1973), which are the socioeconomic and demographic determinants of crime in Spain paying attention on the role of provincial peculiarities. We estimate a crime equation using a panel dataset of Spanish provinces (NUTS3) for the period 1993 to 1999 employing the GMM-system estimator. Empirical results suggest that lagged crime rate and clear-up rate are correlated to all typologies of crime rate considered. Property crimes are better explained by socioeconomic variables (GDP per capita, GDP growth rate and percentage of population with high school and university degree), while demographic factors reveal important and significant influences, in particular for crimes against the person. These results are obtained using an instrumental variable approach that takes advantage of the dynamic properties of our dataset to control for both measurement errors in crime data and joint endogeneity of the explanatory variables.

JEL-codes: I2 J24 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-law, nep-ltv, nep-reg, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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