Thieves, Thugs, and Neighborhood Poverty

David Bjerk ()
Additional contact information
David Bjerk: Claremont McKenna College

No 4470, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: This paper develops a model of crime analyzing how such behavior is associated with individual and neighborhood poverty. The model shows that even under relatively minimal assumptions, a connection between individual poverty and both property and violent crimes will arise, and moreover, "neighborhood" effects can develop, but will differ substantially in nature across crime types. A key implication is that greater economic segregation in a city should have no effect or a negative effect on property crime, but a positive effect on violent crime. Using IV methods, I show this implication to be consistent with the empirical evidence.

Keywords: poverty; crime; neighborhood effects; segregation; instrumental variables; public housing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K42 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-law and nep-ure
Date: 2009-10

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4470.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp4470

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().