Does commerce promote theft? A quantitative study from Beijing, China

Yutian Jiang (jiangyutian0724@outlook.com) and Na Zhang (zhangna@bjtu.edu.cn)
Additional contact information
Yutian Jiang: Beijing Jiaotong University
Na Zhang: Beijing Jiaotong University

Palgrave Communications, 2023, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Commerce, as both an environmental and a social factor, is essential to the study of the causes of urban crimes. This paper aims to comprehensively propose research hypotheses based on these two types of commercial factors and optimise statistical tools with which to analyse commerce’s impact on the level of theft in Beijing. Combining criminal verdicts, census data, points of interest, and information on nighttime lighting, this paper first applies a hierarchical regression model to verify the effectiveness of using commercial environmental and social factors to explain theft statistics and then constructs a structural equation model to analyse the joint influence of multiple commercial factors on those statistics. This paper finds that Beijing’s commerce does not significantly promote theft, verifies the effectiveness of two types of commercial variables and the corresponding Western theories in explaining commerce’s impact on theft in Beijing, and provides empirical data for the study of the causes of theft in a non-Western context.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-023-01706-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:pal:palcom:v:10:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-023-01706-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-01706-x

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).