Anti-Crime Laws and Retail Prices

Hakan Yilmazkuday

Review of Law & Economics, 2017, vol. 13, issue 3, 18

Abstract: The fear of becoming a victim of crime acts as a barrier to retail trade for consumers, where retailers attempt to reduce such barriers by enduring additional costs such as insurance or security/surveillance; as a result, retail prices are affected by the possibility of crime. This paper attempts to measure such effects by considering the recent experience of Sacramento County in California, where an anti-panhandling ordinance has been issued to protect retailers. As an application, a difference-in-difference approach is employed to identify the effects of the ordinance on Sacramento gasoline prices at the retail level, by considering the gasoline prices in neighboring counties as the control group of a natural experiment. The results show that the anti-panhandling ordinance has resulted in lower gasoline prices in Sacramento County.

Keywords: anti-crime laws; gasoline retail prices; gas-station level analysis; county of Sacramento (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H73 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1515/rle-2016-0003

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