Patents and Antitrust: Video Games and Violent Crime

Michael R. Ward ()
Additional contact information
Michael R. Ward: University of Texas, Arlington

No 07-18, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: Psychology studies of the effects of playing video games have found emotional responses and physical reactions associated with reinforced violent and anti-social attitudes. It is not clear, however, whether these markers are associated with increases in one's preferences for anti-social behaviors or whether virtual behaviors act to partially sate one's desire for actual antisocial behaviors. Violent or criminal behaviors in the virtual world and in the physical world could plausibly be either complements or substitutes. A finding of one versus the other would have diametrically opposing policy implications. I study the incidence of criminal activity as related to a proxy for increased gaming, the number of game stores, from a panel of US counties from 1994 to 2004. With fixed county and year effects, I can examine if changes relative increases in gaming in an area are associated with relative increases or decreases in criminal activity. For six of eight categories of crime, more game stores are associated with significant declines in crime rates. Proxies for other leisure activities, sports and movie viewing, do not have a similar effect. For confirmation, I also find that mortality rates, especially mortality rates stemming from injuries, also are negatively related to the number of game stores.

Keywords: Video Games; Violence; Crime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D18 I18 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2007-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.netinst.org/Ward_07-18.pdf (application/pdf)
no

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:net:wpaper:0718

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().