What causes violent crime

This study uses panel data of intentional homicide and robbery rates for a sample of developed and developing countries for the period 1970}1994, based on information from the United Nations World Crime Surveys, to analyze the determinants of national crime rates both across countries and over time. A simple model of the incentives to commit crimes is proposed, which explicitly considers possible causes of the persistence of crime over time (criminal inertia). A panel-data based GMM methodology is used to estimate a dynamic model of national crime rates. This estimator controls for unobserved country-speci" ce !ects, the joint endogeneity of some of the explanatory variables, and the existence of some types of measurement errors a%icting the crime data. The results showthat increases in income inequality raise crime rates, crime tends to be countercyclical, and criminal inertia is signi"cant. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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