Hot and Bothered : The Impact of Weather Shocks on Violent, Property, and Sex Crimes in Jamaica

Developing countries face the largest exposure to the negative effects of climate change. However, as temperature and rainfall patterns change, we have a limited understanding of their impact on these countries and the mitigation strategies that may be most appropriate. In this paper, we utilize police division by day level administrative data to examine the impact of weather shocks on incidents of violent, property, and sex crimes in Jamaica. We find strong evidence that a one standard deviation increase in the daily temperature (2 ◦C) increases violent crimes such as murders (4.90%), shootings (9.65%), and assault and wounding with intent (8%). However, our results suggest that temperature changes have no impact on property or sex crimes. In contrast, we found that a one standard deviation increase in rainfall (2mm) reduces property crimes such as burglaries (1.75%) and larcenies (3.31%), but it had a minimal impact on violent and sex crimes