Examining the Link between Crime and Unemployment: A Time Series Analysis for Canada

Zuzana Janko and Gurleen Popli
Additional contact information
Zuzana Janko: Department of Economics, San Francisco State University, California, USA

No 2013001, Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics

Abstract: We use national and regional Canadian data to analyze the relationship between the unemployment rate and crime rates. Given potential aggregation bias, we disaggregate the aggregate crime data and look at the relationship between six different types of crimes and unemployment rate. At the national level, neither the aggregate total crime, nor the aggregate property crime are significantly related with the unemployment rate; however a rise in unemployment rate does significantly increase certain kinds of property crime, like breaking and entering, and robbery. At the regional level, the results of our panel data analysis also show that breaking and entering, and fraud rise as contemporaneous unemployment increases. When we extend our panel analysis to control for police-civilian ratio and other controls (this reduces our sample period) we find a significant relationship between unemployment and all crime rates except violent crime. Our results thus indicate that for Canada the unemployment rate is a significant factor in predicting property crimes but not violent crimes.

Keywords: crime; unemployment; Canada; time series analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 K1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.shef.ac.uk/economics/research/serps/articles/2013_001.html First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Examining the link between crime and unemployment: a time-series analysis for Canada (2015)
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:shf:wpaper:2013001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mike Crabtree ().