(Updated 5-20-2024)

This blog post serves as a repository of (mainly) academic papers on different topics within the economics of crime literature. It has mostly new papers, and it has been updated as of April 25, 2022. Since I am continually updating it, I have not bothered to change the date of the blog post to save myself the pain of having to update the date each time.

The sections of the blog post are in the table of contents below. Please contact me if you find that an important paper is missing from the lists!

Works on the SYG Law

  • Yakubovich, et al. (2021): Effects of Laws Expanding Civilian Rights to Use Deadly Force in Self-Defense on Violence and Crime: A Systematic Review： The existing evidence contradicts claims that expanding self-defense laws deters violent crime across the United States.

  • GVPedia University (2018): Fact Sheet - Stand Your Ground Laws (media synthesis of research articles)

  • Chamlin & Krajewski (2016): Use of Force and Home Safety: An Impact Assessment of Oklahoma’s Stand Your Ground Law
    • Toward this end, we employ interrupted time series modeling techniques to assess the impact of Oklahoma’s Stand Your Ground Law on the number of residential and non-residential burglaries. The findings indicate that while the legislative initiative achieved its manifest goal of reducing the number of residential burglaries, it simultaneously had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of non-residential burglaries.
  • Ren, Zhang & Zhao (2012): The Deterrent Effect of the Castle Doctrine Law on Burglary in Texas: A Tale of Outcomes in Houston and Dallas
    • On the Joe Horn shooting
  • Roman (2013): Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws
    • Race and the SYG laws
  • Oliver (2021): Late night show episode on it
    • SecondCall Defense, USCCA, US LawShield
  • Levy et al (2020): Stand Your Ground: Policy and Trends in Firearm-Related Justifiable Homicide and Homicide in the US

Right-to-Carry Laws:

  • Donohue, Aneja & Weber (2019): Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime: A Comprehensive Assessment Using Panel Data and a State-Level Synthetic Control Analysis

Other laws:

Methods:

Benefit-Cost Analysis:

Shootings

Education and Crime:

  • Garcia, Heckman & Ziff (2019): Early Childhood Education and Crime
    • Small sample size.
  • Bell, Costa & Machin (2021): Why Does Education Reduce Crime?
    • They provide a unifying empirical framework to study why crime reductions occurred due to a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States
    • Because they reforms changed the shape of crime-age profiles, they generate both a short-term incapacitation effect together with a more sustained crime reducing effect
      • Decomposing short and long run effects, the observed longer run effect for the 1980 education reforms is primarily attributed to dynamic incapacitation
    • In contrast to previous research looking at earlier US education reforms, the reform induced crime reduction does not arise primarily from education improvements

Employments and Crime

  • Cullen, Dobbie & Hoffman (2022): Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record
    • Method: field experiment
    • Results:
      • 39% of businesses are willing to work with individuals with a criminal record
      • over 50% when offered crime and safety insurance, a single performance review, or a limited background check covering just the past year
      • Wage subsidies can achieve similar increases but at substantially higher cost
    • Policy implication: staffing platform relaxed the criminal background check requirement and offered crime and safety insurance to interested businesses

  • Kessler, Tahamont, Gelber & Isen (2021): The Effects of Youth Employment on Crime: Evidence from New York City Lotteries

  • Davis & Heller (2020): Rethinking the Benefits of Youth Employment Programs: The Heterogeneous Effects of Summer Jobs

  • Modestino (2019): How Do Summer Youth Employment Programs Improve Criminal Justice Outcomes, and for Whom?
    • Violent crime decreases by 35%
    • Property crime decreases by 29%
    • Suggestive evidence that the beneficial impacts are largely driven by improved conflict resolution skills versus other factors that would increase the opportunity cost of crime

Inequality and Crime

  • MacLeod (2023): Optimal Deterrence, Inequality and the Jean-Valjean Effect
    • View deterrance as a tax on (criminal) labor supply.
    • When individuals are needy or desperate, the income effect may dominate the substitution effect.
    • Policies undertaken with the intent of deterring crime may, unintuitively, lead to an increase in crime.
    • The policy that minimizes net social costs is characterized by a combination of deterrence and transfers to reduce inequality.
  • Enamorado, Lopez-Calva, Rodriguez-Castelan & Winkler (2015): Income inequality and violent crime: Evidence from Mexico’s drug war
    • Instruments for inequality through initial distribution and national income trends
    • Data is at the municipality level
  • Brush (2007): Does income inequality lead to more crime? A comparison of cross-sectional and time-series analyses of United States counties
    • Data is at the county level
  • Choe (2008): Income inequality and crime in the United States
    • Data is at the state level
    • Time is 1995-2004
  • Kang (2015): Inequality and crime revisited: effects of local inequality and economic segregation on crime
    • Data is at the census tract level

Health and Crime

  • Blattman, Chaskel, Jamison, and Sheridan (2022): Cognitive Behavior Therapy Reduces Crime and Violence over 10 Years: Experimental Evidence
    • NBER working paper
    • CBT & small cash transfer is most effective in reducing crime
  • Maclean, Mallatt, Ruhm, and Simon (2022): The Opioid Crisis, Health, Healthcare, and Crime: A Review of Economic Studies
    • Opioids has negatively impacted health outcomes
      • The healthcare system played a role in the emergence of the epidemic and its continuation
    • Opioids increase crime
      • Link is not as strong as has been observed in previous drug epidemics
      • Finding is consistent with the pharmacological difference between opioids and stimulant substances (e.g., cocaine)

  • Arenberg, Neller & Stripling (2020): The Impact of Youth Medicaid Eligibility on Adult Incarceration

  • Moore & Schnepel (2021): Opioid Use, Health and Crime: Insights from a Rapid Reduction in Heroin Supply
    • In 2001, a large and sustained supply shock halted a heroin epidemic in Australia. We use outpatient drug treatment records to identify individuals who accounted for nearly half of opioid overdoses prior to the shock, and examine how the reduced supply of heroin affected their health and criminal activity over the next eight years. Initially, the gains from fewer overdose deaths are offset by individuals substituting to other drugs and committing more violent crime, including homicides. Most adverse effects dissipate after one year, and are followed by further decreases in deaths and a large reduction in property crime. Our results demonstrate that reducing the supply of illicit opioids can lead to meaningful longer-term improvements, even when the short-term effects are ambiguous.
  • Abdul-Razzak & Hallberg (2021): Unpacking the promise and limitations of behavioral health interventions on interactions with law enforcement
    • RCT on youth program, Choose to Change (C2C)
    • Impacts are on arrests where officers have little discretion
  • Deza, Lu & Maclean (2021): Office-Based Mental Healthcare and Juvenile Arrests
    • 10 additional office-based mental healthcare providers in a county leads to a decrease of 2.3% to 2.6% in the per capita costs to society of juvenile arrest

Family and crime

  • Massenkoff and Rose (2022): Family Formation and Crime
    • NBER working paper
    • Mother’s crime decreases after pregnancy
    • Father’s crime decreases for several years after pregnancy
    • Pre-marital crime decline ends at marriage

Fostering and crime

  • Norris, Pecenco & Weaver (2021): The Effects of Parental and Sibling Incarceration: Evidence from Ohio
    • Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the United States. Parental incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult neighborhood quality. While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity.

Gun ownership

  • Evans & Kotowski (2022): The Demand For Protection and the Persistently High Rates of Gun Violence Among Young Black Males
    • Source: NBER working paper
    • Method: theoretical model
    • Model philosophy: a person may carry a gun for instrumental (i.e., criminal) reasons or for its perceived protective benefit
    • Model predictions: a shock to the instrumental benefit can move the equilibrium to one with a high gun prevalence
    • Model implications: there are larger returns to reducing the value of guns for crime than trying to reduce their protective benefit
    • Policy suggestion: different policy paths to combat the problem of gun violence
  • Acquisti & Tucker (2022): Guns, Privacy, and Crime
    • Research question: publication of names and addresses of holders of handgun carry permits on criminals’ propensity to commit burglaries
    • Method: natural experiment
    • Results: burglary increased in zip codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized
  • Chalak, Kim, Miller & Pepper (2021): Reexamining the Evidence on Gun Ownership and Homicide Using Proxy Measures of Ownership
    • Using firearm homicide rate to proxy for gun ownership

Gun and Self-defense:

  • Defilippis & Hughes (2015): The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership (newspaper article)

  • Zimring (2017): Firearms and Violence (book chapter). Zimring pointed out that the higher rate of civilians killed by police may be associated with the higher rate of police death. He suspects that both may be related with the use of firearms.

  • Hemenway & Solnick (2015)

    • Objectives: To describe the epidemiology of self-defense gun use (SDGU) and the relative effectiveness of SDGU in preventing injury and property loss.

    • Methods: Data come from the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2007-2011, focusing on personal contact crimes. For property loss, we examined incidents where the intent was to steal property. Multivariate analyses controlled for age, gender of offender and victim, if offender had a gun, urbanicity, and thirteen types of self-protective action.

    • Results: Of over 14,000 incidents in which the victim was present, 127 (0.9%) involved a SDGU. SDGU was more common among males, in rural areas, away from home, against male offenders and against offenders with a gun. After any protective action, 4.2% of victims were injured; after SDGU, 4.1% of victims were injured. In property crimes, 55.9% of victims who took protective action lost property, 38.5 of SDGU victims lost property, and 34.9% of victims who used a weapon other than a gun lost property.

    • Conclusions: Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that SDGU is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss.

    • Keywords: Gun; Property loss; Protection; Self-defense.

Law’s unintended consequences:

  • Podkopacz & Feld: “Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile Prosecution” written into law in Minnesota in 1995 attempts to create a buffer zone before sending juvenile offenders to adult corrections facilities. However, many juvenile offenders were still sent to adult prison due to technical parole violations (“back-door” route to prison).

Policing

  • Cho, Goncalves, and Weisburst (2023): “The Impact of Fear on Police Behavior and Public Safety”
    • Abstract: We examine how changes in the salience of workplace risk affect police behavior and public safety. Specifically, we investigate cases of police officer deaths while on duty. Officers respond to a peer death by decreasing arrest activity for one to two months, consistent with heightened fear. Reductions are largest for low-level arrests and are more pronounced in smaller cities. Crime does not increase on average during this period, nor do we observe crime spikes in cities with larger or longer arrest declines. While shocks in fatality risk generate substantial enforcement responses, officer fear is unlikely to harm public safety.
  • Holz, Rivera, and Ba (2023): “Peer Effects in Police Use of Force.”
    • Abstract: We study the link between police officers’ on-duty injuries and their peers’ force use using a network of officers who attended the police academy together through a random lottery. On-duty injuries increase the probability of officers using force by 7 percent in the subsequent week. Officers are also more likely to injure suspects and receive complaints about neglecting victims and violating constitutional rights. The effect is concentrated in a narrow time window following the event and is not associated with significantly lower injury risk to the officer. Together, these findings suggest that emotional responses drive the effects rather than social learning.
  • Amaral, Borker, Fiala, Prakash & Sviatschi (2022): “Street Police Patrols and Violence Against Women in Public Spaces: Experimental Evidence from India”
  • Hoekstra & Sloan (2022): Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence from 911 Calls
    • AER
  • Kaplan & Chalfin (2019): More cops, fewer prisoners?
    • Data: state-level panel data & county-level data from California
    • Method: lagged-dependent variable panel regression
    • Conclusion: more police, fewer prisoners

  • Abrams, Fang & Goonetilleke(2021): The standard economic model of police stops implies that the contraband hit rate should rise when the number of stops falls, ceteris paribus. We provide empirical corroboration of such optimizing models of police behavior by examining changes in stops and frisks around two extraordinary events of 2020 - the pandemic onset and the nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd. We find that hit rates from pedestrian and vehicle stops generally rose as stops and frisks fell dramatically. Using detailed data, we are able to rule out a number of alternative explanations, including changes in street population, crime, police allocation, and policing intensity. We find mixed evidence about the changes in racial disparities, and evidence that police stops do not decrease crime, at least in the short run. The results are robust to a number of different specifications. Our findings provide quantitative estimates that can contribute to the important goals of improving and reforming policing.

  • Goncalves & Mello (2021): “A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing”. AER.
    • Abstract: We estimate the degree to which individual police officers practice racial discrimination. Using a bunching estimation design and data from the Florida Highway Patrol, we show that minorities are less likely to receive a discount on their speeding tickets than White drivers. Disaggregating this difference to the individual police officer, we estimate that 42 percent of officers practice discrimination. We then apply our officer-level discrimination measures to various policy-relevant questions in the literature. In particular, reassigning officers across locations based on their lenience can effectively reduce the aggregate disparity in treatment.
  • Ang (2020): “The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students”, QJE.
    • Abstract: Nearly 1,000 officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This article documents the large, racially disparate effects of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close students live to a killing, I find that exposure to police violence leads to persistent decreases in GPA, increased incidence of emotional disturbance, and lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment. These effects are driven entirely by black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of other minorities and are largest for incidents involving unarmed individuals.
  • Cubukcu, Sahin, Tekin & Topalli: “Body-Worn Cameras and Adjudication of Citizen Complaints of Plice Misconduct”, NBER Working Paper
    • Abstract: Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have been the subject of much research on how the technology’s enhanced documentation of police/citizen interactions impact police behavior. Less attention has been paid to how BWC recordings affect the adjudication of citizen complaints against the police. We employ citizen complaint data from the Chicago Police Department and Civilian Office of Police Accountability filed between 2012-2020 to determine the extent to which BWC footage enhances the efficacy of evidence used to formulate a conclusion of responsibility, and whether bias against complainants based on race would subsequently be reduced. Accordingly, we exploit the staggered deployment of BWCs across 22 Chicago police districts over time to estimate the effect of BWCs on these outcomes. Our findings indicate that BWCs led to a significant decrease in the dismissal of investigations due to insufficient evidence (“not sustained”) as well as a significant increase in disciplinary actions against police officers (“sustained” outcomes”) with sufficient evidence to sanction their misconduct. We further find that disparities in complaints across racial groups for the “unsustained” category fade away with the implementation of BWCs.
  • Ba, Bayer, Rim, Rivera & Sidibe (2021): “Police Officer Assignment and Neighborhood Crime”, NBER Working Paper
    • Abstract: We develop an empirical model of the mechanism used to assign police officers to Chicago districts and examine the efficiency and equity of alternative allocations. We document that the current bidding process, which grants priority based on seniority, results in the assignment of more experienced officers to less violent and high-income neighborhoods. Our empirical model combines estimates of heterogeneous officer preferences underlying the bidding process with causal estimates of the effects of officer experience on neighborhood crime. Equalizing officer seniority across districts would reduce violent crime rate by 4.6 percent and significantly decrease inequality in crime, discretionary arrests, and officer use of force across neighborhoods. Moreover, this assignment can be achieved in a revenue-neutral way while resulting in small welfare gains for police officers, implying that it is more equitable and efficient.
  • Barbosa, Fetzer, Soto & Souza (2021): De-escalation technology: the impact of body-worn cameras on citizen-police interactions
    • Submitted
    • Experiment in Brazil
    • Different results than literature
    • Arguing the difference is due to method of analysis

-Cheng & Long (2022): The effect of highly publicized police killings on policing: Evidence from large U.S. cities - Examining police self-initiated activities provides direct evidence of de-policing.

Race & Criminal Justice System:

  • Feigenberg & Miller (2021): “Racial Divisions and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Southern State Courts”
    • The US criminal justice system is exceptionally punitive. We test whether racial heterogeneity is one cause, exploiting cross-jurisdiction variation in punishment severity in four Southern states. We estimate the causal effect of jurisdiction on arrest outcomes using a fixed effects model that incorporates extensive charge and defendant controls. We validate our estimates using defendants charged in multiple jurisdictions. Consistent with a model of ingroup bias in electorate preferences, the relationship between local severity and Black population share follows an inverted U-shape. Within states, defendants are 27–54 percent more likely to be incarcerated in “peak” heterogeneous jurisdictions than in homogeneous jurisdictions. We estimate that confinement rates and race-based confinement rate gaps would fall by 15 percent if all jurisdictions adopted the severity of homogeneous jurisdictions within their state. (JEL H76, J15, K42)
  • Alston & Owens (2021)
    • Title: Does Black and Blue Matter?: An Experimental Investigation of Race and Perceptions of Police Bias
    • Research question: will racially-diverse police departments lead to less racial bias
    • Results:
      • no evidence that Black or White subjects change their speed based on the racial composition of the police department
      • black subjects are more interested in learning about police officers’ race than white subjects are.

Prisons

  • Mukherjee (2021): “Impacts of Private Prison Contracting on Inmate Time Served and Recidivism”
    • This paper examines the impact of private prison contracting by exploiting staggered prison capacity shocks in Mississippi. Motivated by a model based on the typical private prison contract that pays a per diem for each occupied bed, the empirical analysis shows that private prison inmates serve 90 additional days. This is alternatively estimated as 4.8 percent of the average sentence. The delayed release erodes half of the cost savings offered by private contracting and is linked to the greater likelihood of conduct violations in private prisons. The additional days served do not lead to apparent changes in inmate recidivism. (JEL H76, K42)

Crime Underreporting (not all crimes are reported to the police)

  • Chalfin (2015): The Long-Run Effect of Mexican Immigration on Crime in US Cities: Evidence from Variation in Mexican Fertility Rates
    • AER
  • Baumer & Lauritsen (2010): REPORTING CRIME TO THE POLICE, 1973–2005: A MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF LONG-TERM TRENDS IN THE NATIONAL CRIME SURVEY (NCS) AND NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY (NCVS)
    • Journal: Criminology
    • Crime reporting trend
  • Levitt (1998): The Relationship Between Crime Reporting and Police: Implications for the Use of Uniform Crime Reports
    • More police, more reporting
  • Coleman & Moynihan (1996): Understanding Crime Data: Haunted by the Dark Figure
    • Publication by: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs
  • Kennedy (1988): Going it alone: Unreported crime and individual self-help
    • Journal of Criminal Justice
  • Myers (1980): WHY ARE CRIMES UNDERREPORTED? WHAT IS THE CRIME RATE? DOES IT “REALLY” MATTER?
    • Social Science Quarterly
    • Reasons for underreporting
  • Ehrlich (1977): Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence
    • JPE
    • Assuming level of underreporting independent of crime level
  • Skogan (1977): Dimensions of the Dark Figure of Unreported Crime
    • Journal: Crime & Delinquency
  • Skogan (1975): Measurement problems in official and survey crime rates
    • Journal of Criminal Justice
  • Brodeur et al (2021): COVID-19, lockdowns and well-being: Evidence from Google Trends
    • We look at the effect of COVID-19 and associated lockdowns on population well-being.
    • We use Google Trends data to measure changes in well-being related topic search-terms.
    • We find an increase in searches for boredom, loneliness, worry and sadness.
    • We find a decrease in searches for stress, suicide and divorce.
    • We see evidence of mean-reversion in some (but not all) of the well-being measures.
  • Kearney & Levine (2015): Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing
    • We supplement this analysis with an exploration of data about online activity to determine whether the MTV show influenced viewers’ interest in the topics of birth control and abortion, in so far as it is reflected in their Internet search and social media activity. In particular, we examine the potential influence of 16 and Pregnant on teens’ decision-making process with data on the frequency with which teens search for terms like “how to get birth control” or use the terms “birth control” or “abortion” in their tweets. This analysis provides some insight into the mechanisms that would lead to changes in rates of teen childbearing in the absence of sufficient data on actual levels of sexual activity and contraceptive use.
  • Jetter & Molina (2020): Persuasive agenda-setting: Rodrigo Duterte’s inauguration speech and drugs in the Philippines
    • Exploring the elusive agenda-setting hypothesis pertaining to democratically-elected leaders, we hypothesize that Duterte’s 2016 inauguration speech systematically shifted Filipinos’ policy agenda to prioritizing illegal drugs. In a country that tops internet usage worldwide, we study daily Google searches on the national and regional level, identifying a strong and persistent increase in drug-related searches right after the speech, both in absolute terms and relative to other prominent policy topics. Further estimations rule out alternative explanations, including Duterte’s election campaign, potentially confounding topics (i.e., pharmaceutical drugs, Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’), and common international time trends. Complementing Google search data, individual-level surveys also reveal more respondents considered crime reduction the top national priority right after the speech. To better identify causality, we exploit the historical timing of local festivals, leaving some provinces less exposed to the speech. Results show less-exposed provinces exhibit smaller increases in drug-related Google searches and survey-elicited crime prioritization.

Judge Leniency Method:

  • Coulibaly, Hsu, Mourifie, and Wan (2024)
    • A Sharp Test for the Judge Leniency Design
  • Arnold, Dobbie, and Hull (2022)
    • AER
    • Measure disparate impact in the context of bail decisions
    • Disparate impact is a broad and legally based definition of discrimination encompassing both racial bias and statistical discrimination
    • Measuring disparate impact
      • Adjust for race-specific misconduct risk by rescaling observational release rate comparisons in such a way that makes released White and Black defendants comparable in terms of misconduct potential within each judge’s defendant pool
      • Misconduct potential is calculated as the misconduct risk of the defendants who were released by very lenient judges
      • Estimates for NYC data show that 2/3 of the average release rate disparity between White and Black defendants is due to the disparate impact of release decisions, with the remaining 1/3 attributable to OVB
    • Disentangling racial bias and statistical discrimination
      • Hierarchical marginal treatment effect (MTE) model
      • Evidence of both
      • Counterfactuals
        • Race-specific release rate quotas
        • Quota based on observational release rate disparities

  • Cespedes, Parra & Sialm (2021)

  • Bhuller, Dahl, Loken & Mogstad (2021)

  • Agan, Doleac & Harvey (2021): prosecutor leniency

Police Altering Offense Statistics:

  • Gumbo (2012): newspaper report

  • Sciortino, Vassar, Radetsky, Knudson (2005), Accident Analysis & Prevention, San Francisco pedestrian injury surveillance: Mapping, under-reporting, and injury severity in police and hospital records. The authors obtained data from the following two sources:
    • Statewide Integrated Traffic Reporting System, California Highway Patrol.
  • Rayman (2012): The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy’s 81st Precinct
    • Published as: newspaper article on the Village Voice
    • Summary:
      • police officers under pressure to meet arrest and stop-and-frisk quota to prove that they are doing their job
      • police officers under pressure to manipulate crime statistics
      • “locker room” culture at the police station
    • Relevance to the literature:
      • unveils tapes documenting measures to manipulate crime statistics
        • police officers instructed to refuse to take certain robbery reports
        • police officers calling victims to intimidate them about their complaints
  • O’Neill (2012): NYPD: A Culture of Bullying
    • Published as: Amazon book review
    • Summary: the COMPSTAT program is creating tremendous pressure for police officers through:
      • Crime stats must go down - downgrading crimes, undervaluing stolen property, discouraging victims
      • Police activity must go up - stop and frisk
  • Nolan, Haas & Napier (2011): Estimating the Impact of Classification Error on the “Statistical Accuracy” of Uniform Crime Reports
    • Journal: Journal of Quantitative Criminology
  • Sparrow (2015): Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization
    • Published in: Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource Management
    • Summary: Modern policing requires more than just achieving effective crime control. As a result, definition of success needs to be more nuanced. Ideally, prevention is the best way to go.
    • Relation to literature: In subsection 5.2 (Corruption in Reporting Crime Statistics), under section 5 (A Closer Look at Crime Reduction as the Bottom Line of Policing), author points out that pursuing the goal of crime reduction could lead to altering statistics.
      • Suppression of reports (failing to take reports of crime from victims)
      • Misclassification of crime to lower categories in order to make the serious crime statistics look better
Randomized Controlled Trials
Random Coefficient Models
  • Li (2021): new random coefficient panel model where the regressors can depend on the time-varying random coefficients in each period. Three stage series estimator. Applied to estimating the production function.

IV

  • Chen, Chen and Tamer (2021): Multi-layer ANN Efficient Estimation in Nonparametric Instrumental Variables (NPIV): A Case Study
    • 3-layer ANN
    • Spline performs better

Environment and Crime

  • Hernstadt, Heyes, Muehlegger and Saberian (2021): Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Microgeographic Evidence from Chicago
    • AEJ: applied
    • Data: Chicago 2001-2012
      • Crime: CPD - exact locations of each crime
      • Weather: NCDC
    • Highways
    • Conclusion: air pollution increases violent crime on the downwind sides of interstates.

Judicial system

  • Philippe (2024): Learning by Offending: How Do Criminals Learn about Criminal Law?
    • Abstract: This paper investigates how criminals learn about criminal laws. It uses a natural experiment in which sentences were drastically increased for a specific type of recidivism in France. In the short run, advertising the reform did not trigger any change in criminal behavior. However, people who had firsthand experience of the reform learned about it and later committed significantly fewer targeted crimes, but the same number of nontargeted crimes. Learning appears to be limited to individuals with direct experience of the law. While codefendants also learned, other criminal peers and defendants attending the same trial for another case did not.
  • Ouss and Stevenson (2023): Does Cash Bail Deter Misconduct?
    • Abstract: Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create burdens for defendants with little empirical evidence on its efficacy. We exploit a prosecutor-driven reform that led to a sharp reduction in low cash bail and pretrial supervision, with no effect on pretrial detention, to test whether such incentive mechanisms succeed at their intended purpose. We find no evidence that financial collateral has a deterrent effect on failure to appear or pretrial crime. This paper also contributes to the literature on legal actor discretion, showing that nonbinding reforms may have limited impact on jail populations.
  • Macdonald (2022): Truth in Sentencing, Incentives and Recidivism
    • Methodology: Regression discontinuity and generalized random forest
    • Results: rule infractions increased by 50%, while education program enrollment fell by 20%. Increase in violent infractions was largest for serious offenders, who saw an increase of 150% to 200% in infractions
  • Dobbie & Yang (2021): The US Pretrial System: Balancing Individual Rights and Public Interests
    • NBER Working Paper
    • Summary: review of empirical literature on the effectiveness and fairness of the US pretrial system and discuss its policy implications
    • Conclusions:
      • Current pretrial system imposes substantial short- and long-term economic harms on detained defendants in terms of lost earnings and government assistance, while providing little in the way of decreased criminal activity for the public interest.
      • Costs of cash bail and pretrial detention are disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals, giving rise to large and unfair racial differences in cash bail and detention that cannot be explained by underlying differences in pretrial misconduct risk.
  • Arbour & Marchand (2021)：“Parole, Recidivism, and the Role of Supervised Transition”
    • Estimates the causal effect of parole on recidivism by exploiting the random assignment of parole board members to hearings in Quebec prisons
    • Found that parole is especially successful at reducing recidivism when paired with a stay in a halfway house.
  • Rose & Shem-Tov (2021): “How Does Incarceration Affect Reoffending? Estimating the Dose-Response Function”
    • Budget-neutral reductions in sentence length combined with increases in incarceration rates can decrease recidivism

Location and crime

Plea bargains

  • Baer & Chambliss (1997): Generating fear: The politics of crime reporting
    • Difference between crime reported and plea reached

Social policies and programs

  • Algan, Beasley, Cote, Park, Tremblay and Vitaro: The Impact of Childhood Social Skills and Self-Control Training on Economic and Noneconomic Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment Using Administrative Data
    • Childhood intervention to improve social skills and self-control of at-risk kindergarten boys in the 1980s had positive impacts over the life course, including reduced criminality as young adults.
  • Deshpande & Mueller-Smith (2022): Does Welfare Prevent Crime? The Criminal Justice Outcomes of Youth Removed From SSI
    • NBER working paper

Gentrification and crime

Weather and crime

  • Spencer (2016): Look what the hurricanes just blew in: analyzing the impact of the storm on criminal activities
    • Directly-hit counties experience an increase in crime
    • Nearby counties experience a decrease

Transition of SRS to NIBRS

Authors Year Journal Title Level of Analysis Datasets Used Data Available? Types of Crime *
Luallen 2006 JUE School’s out… forever: A study of juvenile crime, at-risk youths and teacher strikes          
Heaton 2006 JLE Does Religion Really Reduce Crime? county UCR (2000)      
Iyengar 2009 JPubE Does the certainty of arrest reduce domestic violence? Evidence from mandatory and recommended arrest laws state-year SHR (1976-2003)      
Dahl and DellaVigna 2009 QJE Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?   NIBRS      
Rees and Schnepel 2009 JSE College Football Games and Crime   NIBRS   index and more  
Prescott and Rockoff 2011 JLE Do Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior? ori-month NIBRS   sex offenses  
Cheng, Long 2022 JPubE The effect of highly publicized police killings on policing: Evidence from large U.S. cities Large U.S. Cities SLMPD & UCR (2010-2016) arrest data NA Total crime  
Miller, Segal, and Spencer (AP) 2022 JUE Effects of COVID‐19 shutdowns on domestic violence in US cities ORI ORI (2019 and 2020) N/A Domestic violence *
Lindo, Swensen, and Waddell 2022 JHE Effects of violent media content: Evidence from the rise of the UFC ORI UCR (2001 - 2016) NA Index crime  
Abrams 2021 JPubE COVID and crime: An early empirical look Large US cities Open Data portals at the city level NA Wide variety  
Moreno-Melina 2021 REStat Sinning in the Rain: Weather Shocks, Church Attendance and Crime County UCR link    
Cook and Taylor 2019 EL The impact of mandatory arrest laws on domestic violence in times of economic stress state NIBRS (2000-2015) NA Domestic violence  
Chalfin, Danagoulian, and Deza 2019 JHE More sneezing, less crime? Health shocks and the market for offenses city NIBRS and city data NA violent, property  
Pyun and Hall 2019 AE Does the presence of professional football cause crime in a city? Evidence from Pontiac, Michigan city NIBRS   Larceny, vandalism, assault, and auto theft *
Lindo, Siminski, and Swensen 2018 AEJ: Applied College Party Culture and Sexual Assault university police NIBRS Link Sexual assault  
Doleac 2017 AEJ: Applied The Effects of DNA Databases on Crime Individual and DOC      
Depew and Eren 2016 JUE Born on the wrong day? School entry age and juvenile crime Individual Juvenile Corrections NA    
Doleac and Sanders 2015 REStat Under the Cover of Darkness: How Ambient Light Influences Criminal Activity jurisdictions NIBRS (2005-2008) NA felony robbery  
Anderson and Rees 2015 JLE Deployments, Combat Exposure, and Crime agency and month NIBRS (2001-2009)   Assaults, murder, rapes, and robberies  
Ranson 2014 JEEM Crime, weather, and climate change county-month UCR (1980-2019)   Index crime  
Yoruk 2014 JHE Can technology help to reduce underage drinking? Evidence from the false ID laws with scanner provision individual NLSY97      
Heaton 2012 JPE Sunday liquor laws and crime jurisdiction NIBRS (2001-2008)      
Cunningham and Kendall 2011 JUE Prostitution 2.0: The changing face of sex work   SASP (2008-2009)      
Card and Dahl 2011 QJE Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior   NIBRS      
Foley 2011 REStat Welfare Payments and Crime          
Agan 2011 JLE Sex Offender Registries: Fearwithout Function? state-year UCR (1985-2003)   index crime  

NIBRS

  • Lantz (2021): Why More Agencies and Researchers Should Embrace the Upcoming NIBRS Transition: Contributions and Promise of the NIBRS Data
  • Strom & Smith (2017): The Future of Crime Data
    • Criminology & Public Policy
    • NIBRS has edit checks for reviewing the completeness and accuracy of the data reported
  • Pattavina, Carkin, and Tracy (2017): Assessing the Representativeness of NIBRS Arrest Data
    • NIBRS arrest data are a close match to UCR data overall
  • McCormack, Pattavina, and Tracy (2017): Assessing the Coverage and Representativeness of the National Incident-Based Reporting System
    • NIBRS until 2013 was not a good representation of the crime rate in the United States
  • SEARCH (1997): Implementing the National Incident-Based Reporting System: A Project Status Report (NCJ 165581)
  • Poggio, Kennedy, Chaiken, and Carlson (1985): Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting System

Economics papers using the NIBRS

  • Moreno-Melina (2021): Sinning in the Rain: Weather Shocks, Church Attendance and Crime
    • REStat
    • SRS supplemented by the NIBRS
  • Lindo (2018): College Party Culture and Sexual Assault
    • NIBRS data only
  • Foley (2011): Welfare Payments and Crime
    • SRS and NIBRS data from 12 different cities
  • Card and Dahl (2011): Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior
    • NIBRS only

Cannibas

    • Scraping through API once per day
    • Using discrete choice model to find consumer preferences

Cryptocurrency

  • Cong, Landsman, Maydew, and Rabetti (2022): Tax-Loss Harvesting with Cryptocurrencies
    • Increased government tax scrutiny have led to changes in trading behavior by crypto traders
  • Cong, Harvey, Rabetti, and Wu (2023): An Anatomy of Crypto-Enabled Cybercrimes
    • Data: public, proprietary, and hand-collected data including dark web conversations in Russian
    • Method: Figures and tables
    • Results: a few organized ransomware gangs dominate the crypto-enabled cybercrime space
    • Policy implications: blanket restrictions on cryptocurrency usage may prove ineffective in tackling crypto-enabled cybercrime and hinder innovations. Instead, blockchain transparency and digital footprints enable effective forensics for tracking, monitoring, and shutting down dominant cybercriminal organizations.

Methods

Data cleaning

-d’Este (2020): The Effects of Stolen-Goods Markets on Crime: Pawnshops, Property Theft, and the Gold Rush of the 2000s - Clean UCR data

-Burkhardt et al (2020): The Relationship Between Monthly Air Pollution and Violent Crime Across the United States - Clean UCR data

Spatial methods

  • Weber (2021): The big house far from home: spatial distance and criminal recidivism
    • Two-sample instrumental variables strategy
      • Instrumented for an inmate’s distance from home with the average or minimum distance to state facilities from their home county.
    • Combine national data on prison admissions and releases with cross-sectional inmate facility assignment information from Florida and Oklahoma
    • Doubling an inmate’s distance from home decreases the rate of 1-year recidivism by 3.3 percentage points
    • Deterioration of criminal ties appears to be an important driver of this result

Twitter scraping

  • Kim (2022): Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter
    • Twitter scraping for sentiment analysis