Socio-economic and geographic profiling of crime in Chile

Mauro Gutiérrez, Javier Nunez and Jorge Rivera

Revista CEPAL, 2009

Abstract: Many empirical studies of crime assume that victims andperpetrators live in a single geographical unit, the implication being thatthe socio-economic characteristics of victims' places of residence canbe treated as determinants of crime. This study offers an alternativeapproach which consists in measuring crime by the proportion of allegedoffenders in the whole population and treating the characteristics of theirhome communes as socio-economic causes of criminal behaviour. Theconclusion is that those charged with crimes present a high degree ofgeographic mobility. In the case of economically motivated crimes, theevidence partly supports Becker's propositions. Lastly, we show that thenumber of people charged with crimes tends to be greater in communesthat have low incomes, a larger police presence, a predominance of urbanareas with higher levels of education and a geographical location in thenorth of the country, which to some degree bears out the findings of otherstudies on Chile.

Date: 2009-12
Note: Includes bibliography
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repositorio.cepal.org/handle/11362/11484

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecr:col070:11484

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revista CEPAL from Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Biblioteca CEPAL ().