RT Article
T1 Theoretical and Empirical Work on the Relationship Between Unemployment and Crime
JF Journal of quantitative criminology
VO 17
IS 4
SP 391
OP 407
A1 Paternoster, Raymond 1952-2017
A2 Bushway, Shawn
LA English
YR 2001
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1767143656
AB Part of the ongoing debate between Cantor and Land and Greenberg centers on differing opinions about the question of interest in Cantor and Land (1985). We begin this article with our opinion that Cantor and Land's theory relates changes in the business cycle to changes in the aggregate rate of crime. We then question whether year-to-year changes adequately reflect changes in the business cycle, which last on average 4 years, and we refer to an article by Cook and Zarkin (1985) which presents an alternative method of measuring business cycle changes. We also discuss how Greenberg's use of cointegration provides an alternative way of addressing the difficult statistical problem of nonstationarity without resorting to first differences. Our final contribution involves noticing that opportunity and motivational theories of crime can be structurally identified by focusing on different types of crime rather than temporal lags. We demonstrate this idea by splitting car theft into joyriding and theft for profit. We show that joyriding appears to be driven by opportunity, while the causal structure of theft for profit is less clear.
K1 Auto Theft
K1 Cointegration
K1 motivation and opportunity
K1 business cycle
K1 Unemployment and crime
DO 10.1023/A:1012593805457