Formal and informal deterrents of crime in Japan: Roles of police and social capital revisited

Eiji Yamamura

The Journal of Socio-Economics, 2009, vol. 38, issue 4, pages 611-621

Abstract: Using Japanese prefecture-level panel data, this paper examines how the crime rate is affected by formal and informal deterrents as reflected by police and social capital, respectively. Both, however, suffer from the endogeneity problem and therefore the estimation results are biased when regression analysis is conducted. Hence, the fixed effects 2SLS method is employed to control for the endogeneity bias as well as for unobservable fixed effects. As well, the relationship between inequality and crime is examined. The main findings are: (1) police and social capital reduce the crime rate and their effects increase when the endogeneity bias is controlled for through fixed effects 2SLS estimation. (2) The effects of social capital, which is smaller than that of police, is however is reinforced by police through the complementary relationship existing between them.

Keywords: Crime; Police; Social; capital; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W5H ... 3b003d60cd6e8f6b28f4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:38:y:2009:i:4:p:611-621

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Socio-Economics is edited by M. Altman

More articles in The Journal of Socio-Economics from Elsevier
Series data maintained by Heidi Boesdal ().