Expected returns to crime and crime location

Nils Braakmann, Arnaud Chevalier and Tanya Wilson

Working Papers from Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow

Abstract: We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price movements on the international market for gold exogenously affect the expected gains from burgling these households, which become relatively more lucrative targets as the gold price increases. Using a neighbourhood-level panel on reported crime and difference-in-differences, we find that burglaries in South Asian neighbourhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighbourhoods in the same municipality, confirming that burglars react rationally to variations in the expected returns to their activities. We conduct a battery of tests on neighbourhood and individual data to eliminate alternative explanations.

Keywords: Crime; Gold prices; Returns to crime; Becker model; Optimal Foraging Theory; Criminal Behaviour; Crime Location (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J19 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-law and nep-ure
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Related works:
Journal Article: Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location (2024)
Working Paper: Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gla:glaewp:2022_10

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