Decomposing the Societal Opportunity Costs of Property Crime

Olivia Compton

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this paper, I explore how property crime can affect static and dynamic general equilibrium behavior of households and firms. I calibrate a model with a representative firm and heterogeneous households where households have the choice to commit property crime. In contrast to previous literature, I treat crime as a transfer rather than home production. This creates a feedback loop wherein negative productivity shocks increase property crime which further depresses legitimate work and capital accumulation. These responses by households are particularly important when thinking about the effect of property crime on the economy. Household and firm losses account for 24% of compensating variation (CV) and 37% of lost production. This suggests that behavioral responses are quite important when calculating the cost of property crime. Finally, on the margin, decreasing property crime by 1\% increases social welfare by 0.19%, but the effect is diminishing suggesting that reducing crime entirely may not be optimal from a policymakers perspective.

Keywords: Crime; Welfare; Police; Public Goods; Business Cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E26 E32 H41 K1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-law, nep-mac and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/97002/1/MPRA_paper_97002.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:97002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().