Social multipliers in crime: Measuring the spillover effects of criminal behaviour.
Does one person's criminal behaviour induce others to commit crime? Knowing if the answer is yes and, if so, the magnitude of such spillovers in criminal behaviour is essential for the optimal design and cost effectiveness of crime prevention policies.
If there are social multipliers in crime, then this means that the costs of crime are underestimated if we limit ourselves to focusing on the primary perpetrator, since in addition to the primary effect, the crime may induce crime by others.
Despite the importance of this question, there is little conclusive evidence of the existence of social multipliers in crime.
We establish a stark difference in the criminal behaviour of young fathers according to whether the child is a boy or a girl, which is a plausibly random event.
Thus, the gender of the child provides exogenous variation in the criminal behaviour of young fathers.
These findings imply a large social multiplier in crime: over a five-year period, one crime committed by a crime-prone individual causes five additional new crimes by that individual's peers.
Having established in the first step of our analysis that a child's gender creates exogenous differences in the fathers' level of criminal behaviour, in the second step we isolate the effect of this on the fathers' peers.
In contrast to the young fathers, peers show no response in aspects other than crime, which means that it is unlikely that peers' responses are related to other channels than fathers' criminal behaviour.
By comparing the magnitudes of the responses of young fathers and of their peers, we are further able to estimate this social multiplier underlying the spillover effects in criminal behaviour.
By using the estimates to recover the parameters of a structural model of crime interaction, our study illustrates further that an exogenous shock to a focal individual's criminal activity is amplified through feedback to and between his peers and himself, thereby generating crime multipliers that continue to increase even after the primary impact of the initial shock has dissipated.
https://voxeu.org/article/social-multipliers-criminal-behaviour
Does one person's criminal behaviour induce others to commit crime? Knowing if the answer is yes and, if so, the magnitude of such spillovers in criminal behaviour is essential for the optimal design and cost effectiveness of crime prevention policies.
If there are social multipliers in crime, then this means that the costs of crime are underestimated if we limit ourselves to focusing on the primary perpetrator, since in addition to the primary effect, the crime may induce crime by others.
Despite the importance of this question, there is little conclusive evidence of the existence of social multipliers in crime.
We establish a stark difference in the criminal behaviour of young fathers according to whether the child is a boy or a girl, which is a plausibly random event.
Thus, the gender of the child provides exogenous variation in the criminal behaviour of young fathers.
These findings imply a large social multiplier in crime: over a five-year period, one crime committed by a crime-prone individual causes five additional new crimes by that individual's peers.
Having established in the first step of our analysis that a child's gender creates exogenous differences in the fathers' level of criminal behaviour, in the second step we isolate the effect of this on the fathers' peers.
In contrast to the young fathers, peers show no response in aspects other than crime, which means that it is unlikely that peers' responses are related to other channels than fathers' criminal behaviour.
By comparing the magnitudes of the responses of young fathers and of their peers, we are further able to estimate this social multiplier underlying the spillover effects in criminal behaviour.
By using the estimates to recover the parameters of a structural model of crime interaction, our study illustrates further that an exogenous shock to a focal individual's criminal activity is amplified through feedback to and between his peers and himself, thereby generating crime multipliers that continue to increase even after the primary impact of the initial shock has dissipated.
https://voxeu.org/article/social-multipliers-criminal-behaviour
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