Commuting for crime

Tom Kirchmaier (), Monica Langella and Alan Manning

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: People care about crime, with the spatial distribution of both actual and perceived crime affecting the amenities from living in different areas and residential decisions. The literature finds that crime tends to happen close to the offender’s residence but does not clearly establish whether this is because the location of likely offenders and crime opportunities are close to each other or whether there is a high commuting cost for criminals. We use a rich administrative dataset from one of the biggest UK police forces to disentangle these two hypotheses, providing an estimate of the cost of distance and how local socio-economic characteristics affect both crimes that are committed and the offenders’ location. We find that the cost of distance is very high and has a great deterrence effect. We also propose a procedure for controlling for the selection bias induced by the fact that offenders’ location is only known when they are caught.

Keywords: crime; commuting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2021-02-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-law and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/114412/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Commuting for Crime (2024)
Working Paper: Commuting for crime (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:114412

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().