Cycles in Crime and Economy Revised

Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia

Abstract: In the last decades, the interest in the relationship between crime and business cy- cle has widely increased. It is a diffused opinion that a causal relationship goes from economic variables to criminal activities, but this causal effect is observed only for some typology of crimes, such as property crimes. In this work we examine the pos- sibility of the existence of some common factors (interpreted as cyclical components) driving the dynamics of Gross Domestic Product and a large set of criminal types by using the nonparametric version of the dynamic factor model. A first aim of this exercise is to detect some comovements between the business cycle and the cyclical component of some typologies of crime, which could evidence some relationships between these variables; a second purpose is to select which crime types are related to the business cycle and if they are leading, coincident or lagging. Italy is the case study for the time span 1991 - 1 - 2004 - 12; the crime typologies are constituted by the 22 official categories classified by the Italian National Statistical Institute. The study finds that most of the crime types show a counter-cyclical behavior with respect to the overall economic performance, and only a few of them have an evident relation- ship with the business cycle. Furthermore, some crime offenses, such as bankruptcy, embezzlement and fraudulent insolvency, seem to anticipate the business cycle, in line with recent global events.

Keywords: business cycle; crime; common factors; dynamic factor models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C3 E32 K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crenos.unica.it/crenos/node/3228
https://crenos.unica.it/crenos/sites/default/files/WP11-07.pdf (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:cns:cnscwp:201107

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRENoS ().