We analyze the impact on crime of 3.7 million refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors' offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered...

We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price movements on the...

We examine the short- and medium-term effects of announcements of changes in anti-crime policies in the distant future (news shocks) and provide a first extension of the analysis to cases where the announced policy changes may not be realized in the end (noise shocks). We further innovate by...

This paper asks whether social movements taking place on Twitter affect gender-based violence (GBV). Using Twitter data and machine learning methods, we construct a novel data set on the prevalence of Twitter conversations about GBV. We then link this data to weekly crime reports at the federal...

I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities' surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto theft. Starting in 2014, many municipalities...

This paper develops a dynamic life-cycle equilibrium model of crime with hetero-geneous agents and human capital accumulation. Agents decide at each point in time whether to commit crimes by comparing potential gains from crime to the expected cost of punishment (determined from the probability...

A stylized fact in criminology holds that those who commit crimes are more likely to be victims of crime, and vice versa. We use population-level administrative data of all police investigations in New Zealand to examine the possibility of this victim-offender overlap. Two-way fixed effects and...

The fraud triangle is well-known and has been applied for many years in explaining a variety of white-collar crimes. Equally, the Dark Triad of psychological traits has been applied in definitions of individuals who exhibit a range of criminal activities. In this paper, the concept of financial...

Some of the costs of enforcing laws are fixed" - - in the sense that they do not depend on the number of individuals who commit harmful acts- -while other costs are "variable"- - they rise with the number of such individuals. This article analyzes the effects of fixed and variable enforcement...

The contemporary legal regime in the United States extensively shields corporate officers from prosecution for acts equivalent to criminality under law and societal norms. An earlier paper presented a conceptualization of corporate equivalencies to murder and assault. In this paper, I extend it...

Our criminal codes are replete with “dead crimes”—i.e., crimes that are openly violated, have long gone unenforced, and no longer reflect majoritarian views. For example, many states still criminalize conduct as commonplace as engaging in certain innocuous behavior on Sundays, swearing,...

Digital forensic investigation Is a procedure to assure that digital evidence is identified, collected, preserved, examined, and reported in a manner to ensure the integrity of evidence remains unchanged. A standard and acceptable digital forensic investigation process be influenced by...

Most of the time most individuals do not commit crime. Why? One explanation is deontological. People abide by legal rules just because these are the rules. In this perspective, the power of normativity is critical. It is supported by experimental evidence. To an impressive degree, participants...

Intuitively, by increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activities, positive economic shocks should reduce crime. However, the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic shocks and criminal behavior is at best ambiguous. This may be because certain types of shocks...

This paper studies the effects of immigration on crime and crime perceptions in Chile, where the foreign-born population more than doubled in the last decade. By using individual-level victimization data, we document null effects of immigration on crime but positive and significant effects on...

We study the relationship between housing inequality and crime in South Africa. We create a novel panel dataset combining information on crimes at the police station level with census data. We find that housing inequality explains a significant share of the variation in both property and violent...

Recent years have seen a rise in mass shooting incidents in the United States. While direct victims and their families undoubtedly suffer the most serious consequence of mass shootings, little is known on whether mass shootings have negative impacts beyond those immediately exposed to the...

How long survives perception of change after evaporation of the actual change? I investigate the effect of daylight on crime and fear of crime. Forty years of reforms shifted the boundaries between Russian eleven time zones. I find that a permanent switch to a later sunset leads to a two year...

Most studies examining the impact of migrants on crime rates in hosting populations are in the context of economic migrants in developed countries. However, we know much less about the crime impact of refugees in low- and middle-income countries - whose numbers are increasing worldwide. This...

Most studies examining the impact of migrants on crime rates in hosting populations are in the context of economic migrants in developed countries. However, we know much less about the crime impact of refugees in low- and middle-income countries - whose numbers are increasing worldwide. This...

We empirically test the relationship between crime and impatience at the individual level exploiting data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Besides providing information on both violent and property crimes, NLSY97 allows to observe different behaviors sharing...

Do reductions in arrests increase crime? We study line-of-duty deaths of police officers, events that likely impact police behavior through increased fear but are unlikely to directly impact civilian behavior. Officer deaths cause significant short-term reductions in all arrest types, with the...

How do changes in mobility impact crime? Using police precinct-level daily crime statistics and shootings data from the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we estimate that extortion, theft, and robberies decrease by at least 41.6% following COVID-19 mandated stay-at-home orders and changes in...

Digital technologies are creating more value and thus becoming more attractive to cyber criminals. Gary Becker provides a philosophy for understanding crimes from an economic perspective, but criminal behavior and potential policies against it differ in the context of a digital economy....