EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Drugs on the Web, Crime in the Streets - The Impact of Dark Web Marketplaces on Street Crime

Diego Zambiasi

No 202025, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin

Abstract: The Dark Web has changed the way drugs are traded globally by shifting trade away from the streets and onto the web. In this paper, I study whether the Dark Web has an impact on street crime, a common side effect of traditional drug trade. To identify a causal effect, I use daily data from the US and exploit unexpected shutdowns of large online drug trading platforms. In a regression discontinuity design, I compare crime rates in days after the shutdowns to those immediately preceding them. I find that shutting down Dark Web markets leads to a significant increase in drug trade in the streets. However, the effect is short-lived. In the days immediately following shutdowns, drug-related crimes increase by five to almost ten percent but revert to pre-shutdown levels within ten days. I find no impact of shutdowns of Dark Web marketplaces on thefts, assaults, homicides and prostitution.

Keywords: Dark web; Darknet markets; Drugs; Crime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K24 K42 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10197/11645 First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Drugs on the Web, Crime in the Streets. The impact of Dark Web marketplaces on street crime (2020) Downloads
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:ucn:wpaper:202025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicolas Clifton ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-29
Handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:202025