Inequality and Crime

By Morgan Kelly. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2000

899 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties. The behavior of property and violent crime are quite different. Inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime, with an elasticity above 0.5. By contrast, poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime, but little on violent crime. Property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime, while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8abc70b977bcbb38669f159b71a06f4c57c70803

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In General Health Professions

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Citations in the corpus

A random walk in the literature on criminality: A partial and critical view on some statistical analyses and modelling approaches (2010, positive): “These results have been criticised [62, 81] and the debate that”
Inequality and crime revisited: effects of local inequality and economic segregation on crime (2015, background): “Based on the cross-sectional data on crime and inequality in the U.S. counties in 1990, Kelly (2000) finds that inequality is a significant predictor of violent crime rates.”
Income inequality and violent crime : evidence from Mexico's drug war (2014, positive): “2 According to information of the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys in 2012, 42.8 percent of Mexico’s firms paid for private security, spending the equivalent of about 2.2 percent of their annual sales on these services. In addition, according to official numbers of the Ministry of Finance, the total ”
Income Inequality and Subjective Wellbeing: Trends, Challenges, and Research Directions (2016, background): “By way of contrast, people living in more equal communities are expected to receive more social support through institutions and the social community, are comforted by higher levels of institutional trust, and can rely on an active civic community (see e.g. Brush 2007; Choe 2008; Costa and Kahn 2003”
Crime and Local Inequality in South Africa (2002, background): “Population density may be an important determinant of crime, either by increasing the supply of potential victims who do not know the criminal, or by reducing the chances of apprehension (Kelly, 2000).”
Youth Unemployment and Crime in France (2009, background): “As predicted by Becker’s rational model of crime, property crime is better explained than violent crime or family crime (see Kelly (2000) for a similar observation).”
The Social Costs of Gun Ownership (2004, neutral): “3 Kelly (2000) used this sample of counties in studying the determinants of crime rates.”
The Returns to Education: A Review of Evidence, Issues and Deficiencies in the Literature (2000, neutral): “Krueger and Lindahl (1999) also stress how causality can be confused – it is not clear that cross-country differences in education are a cause of income, or a result of income or income growth.”
Dynamic linkages between poverty, inequality, crime, and social expenditures in a panel of 16 countries: two-step GMM estimates (2020, background): “Kelly (2000) investigated the relationship between income inequality (INC_INEQ) and urban crime, and found that INC_INEQ is the strong predictor to influence violent crime rather than property crime, while poverty (POV) and economic growth (EG) significantly affect on property crime rather than…”
Does the Profile of Income Inequality Matter for Economic Growth? (2005, background): “In many theoretical and empirical papers, income or wage inequality and poverty appear to be recurrent explanatory factors, among other explanations, for crime, for victimization and for homicide (e.g. Kelly, 2000; Fajnzylber et al., 2002).”
Status Concerns as a Motive for Crime? (2015, background): “…and crime has in most contributions established a positive link between the two (see Dahlberg and Gustavsson 2008, Demombynes and Özler 2005, Fajnzylber et al. 2002, Whitworth 2012, forthcoming), although other results have also been found (see Kelly 2000 and Chintrakarn and Herzer 2012).”