Personal indebtedness, community characteristics and theft crimes
McIntyre, Stuart (2013) Personal indebtedness, community characteristics and theft crimes. In: 53rd ERSA Congress. Regional Integration: Europe, the Mediterranean and the World Economy, 2013-08-27 - 2013-08-31.
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Abstract
Becker (1968) and Stigler (1970) provide the germinal works for an economic analysis of crime, and their approach has been utilised to consider the response of crime rates to a range of economic, criminal and socioeconomic factors. Until recently however this did not extend to a consideration of the role of personal indebtedness in explaining the observed pattern of crime. This paper uses the Becker (1968) and Stigler (1970) framework, and extends to a fuller consideration of the relationship between economic hardship and theft crimes in an urban setting. The increase in personal debt in the past decade has been significant, which combined with the recent global recession, has led to a spike in personal insolvencies. In the context of the recent recession it is important to understand how increases in personal indebtedness may spillover into increases in social problems like crime. This paper uses data available at the neighbourhood level for London, UK on county court judgments (CCJ's) granted against residents in that neighbourhood, this is our measure of personal indebtedness, and examines the relationship between a range of community characteristics (economic, socio-economic, etc), including the number of CCJ's granted against residents, and the observed pattern of theft crimes for three successive years using spatial econometric methods. Our results confirm that theft crimes in London follow a spatial process, that personal indebtedness is positively associated with theft crimes in London, and that the covariates we have chosen are important in explaining the spatial variation in theft crimes. We identify a number of interesting results, for instance that there is variation in the impact of covariates across crime types, and that the covariates which are important in explaining the pattern of each crime type are largely stable across the three periods considered in this analysis.
ORCID iDs
McIntyre, Stuart ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0640-7544;-
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Item type: Conference or Workshop Item(Paper) ID code: 47145 Dates: DateEvent2013PublishedNotes: Awarded joint 2nd place in the Epainos Award 2013 Subjects: Social Sciences > Communities. Classes. Races > Regional economics. Space in economics
Social Sciences > Economic TheoryDepartment: Strathclyde Business School > Economics Depositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 10 Mar 2014 12:56 Last modified: 20 Oct 2024 00:50 Related URLs: URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/47145