The Crime Kuznets Curve

Paolo Buonanno, Leopoldo Fergusson and Juan Vargas

No 11012, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: Abstract We document the existence of a Crime Kuznets Curve in US states since the 1970s. As in come level shave risen, crime has followed an inverted U-shaped pattern, first increasing and then dropping. The Crime Kuznets Curve is not explained by income inequality. In fact, we show that during the sample period inequality has risen monotonically with income, ruling out the traditional Kuznets Curve. Our finding is robust to adding a large set of controls that are used in the literature to explain the incidence of crime, as well as to controlling for state and year fixed effects. The Curve is also revealed in nonparametric specifications. The Crime Kuznets Curve exists for property crime and for some categories of violent crime.

Keywords: Crime Kuznets Curve; Income inequality; Non-parametric Kernel analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2014-04-11
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https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8488/dcede2014-16.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: The crime kuznets curve (2014)
Working Paper: The crime kuznets curve (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:011012

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