Youth Unemployment and Crime in France

By D. Fougère, Francis Kramarz, J. Pouget. Social Science Research Network, 2009

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we examine the influence of unemployment on property crimes and on violent crimes in France for the period 1990 to 2000. This analysis is the first extensive study for this country. We construct a regional-level data set (for the 95 departements of metropolitan France) with measures of crimes as reported to the Ministry of Interior. To assess social conditions prevailing in the departement in that year, we construct measures of the unemployment rate as well as other social, economic and demographic variables using multiple waves of the French Labor Survey. We estimate a classic Becker type model in which unemployment is a measure of how potential criminals fare in the legitimate job market. First, our estimates show that in the cross-section dimension, crime and unemployment are positively associated. Second, we find that increases in youth unemployment induce increases in crime. Using the predicted industrial structure to instrument unemployment, we show that this effect is causal for burglaries, thefts, and drug offences. To combat crime, it appears thus that all strategies designed to combat youth unemployment should be examined.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4a3ceac06e1a06e36badf6428a47d902d122d26

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The Social Effects of Ethnic Diversity at the Local Level: A Natural Experiment with Exogenous Residential Allocation (2016, methodology): “The other is block unemployment rate (computed using the 1999 census) since this is a potential confounding factor for explaining criminality and other socioeconomic outcomes, as shown by Fougère, Kramarz, and Pouget (2009) andHémet (2013).”
Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature (2017, background): “…roughly one-third of the crime drop during the 1990s.39 On the whole, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that there is an important 39 Fougere, Kramarz, and Pouget (2009) provide a similar analysis for France, finding effects that are similar in magnitude. relationship between…”
Do Immigrants Cause Crime (2012, background): “(2002), Oster and Agell (2007) and Fougère et al. (2009). This approach sweeps out measurement errors that are constant within geographical areas (over time) or within periods (across areas).”
UK Unemployment in the Great Recession (2010, background): “4) Increases in the unemployment rate tend to be associated with increases in the suicide rate (Platt, 1984; Pritchard, 1992; Blakeley et al., 2003; Hamermesh and Soss, 1974; Daly et al. 2008).”
Good Jobs and Recidivism (2018, methodology): “, 2002; Machin and Meghir, 2004; Levitt, 2004; Öster and Agell, 2007; Lin, 2008; Fougère et al., 2009; Gronqvist, 2013). To address an endogenous relationship between crime rates and labor market conditions, recent research uses an instrumental variable strategy (Raphael and Winter-Ebmer, 2001; Goul”