Road to Crime : Expressway Connections and Child Trafficking

Child trafficking is a long-lasting social issue in China. We argue that abducted children increase as an indirect and unintended consequence of improved urban infrastructure, such as the construction of expressways that facilitate the expedient transfer of victims between cities. To identify the causal relationship, we combine family-reported incidents of child abduction with geo-referenced data of China's highway routes to explore the impact of expressways on connected cities in comparison to unconnected cities using a difference-in-differences approach and city-pair matching strategy. The results support our assumptions and are robust after addressing the concerns regarding the endogeneity of route placement and staggered treatment timing. Expanded trafficking markets in both supply and demand sides, as well as the increased number of intermediaries for transporting children because of the establishment of expressways, could account for the identified pattern