Three essays on the economics of crime

• Ano de defesa: 2017
• Autor(a) principal: Masiero, Ilaria
• Orientador(a): Soares, Rodrigo Reis
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Crime; Polícia; Efeito de substituição de tempo; Copa do Mundo; Experimento natural
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Voluntary incapacitation; Internet; Entertainment; Time substitution effect; World Cup
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/18282

Prevention is commonly recognized as the best way to go in the fight against delinquency. Yet, working out sound policies is an extremely challenging task. The first two essays in this thesis contribute to the pursuit of innovative tools by highlighting the crime-preventing potential of technologies and occupations that make people willingly alter their time allocation choices. The rationale behind this is simple: offenses will be averted if individuals choose to engage in less crime-conducive activities substituting time away from more crime-conducive activities. This mechanism is known in the literature as “voluntary incapacitation”. In particular, the first paper analyzes the impact of Internet diffusion on crime in the US. Using a panel of state level yearly data and adopting an instrumental variable approach, I find a negative and significant relationship between Internet penetration and total and property crimes. Based on my theoretical framework, I interpret this outcome as reflecting voluntary incapacitation: time spent online crowds out alternative activities that would more likely lead to crime. The second essay investigates the entertainment-crime relationship by analyzing how criminal activity behaved in the city of São Paulo during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Outcomes show that crime is significantly lower during matches, especially those with the highest remote viewership rates. Further tests suggest that these findings reflect the voluntary incapacitation effect, whereby the potential for criminal interaction (and thus crime) drops as people are busy watching the games. The main policy-relevant conclusion from the first two essays in this thesis is that providing access to technologies (such as the Internet) and entertainment activities (such as sporting events) may trigger a crime-preventive effect via voluntary incapacitation. The third paper also relates to crime prevention by tackling a crucial issue in the economics of crime literature – the empirical assessment of the deterrent role of policing. The difficulty arises from the fact that crime and police presence are simultaneously determined, causing a problem of reverse causality. I address the issue by considering the natural experiment represented by the creation of a special police unit to intensify surveillance around a few tournament-related locations in the city of São Paulo during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. I take into account that the championship may impact crime in other ways than just through increased policing, namely via fan concentration and voluntary incapacitation. In order to disentangle the specific effect of police on crime, I exploit the fact that the World Cup affected different areas of the city through different channels and at different times. Difference-in-differences estimates reveal that increased police presence leads to a significant reduction in criminal activity. The predicted elasticity of crime to police presence is remarkably close to estimates from previous studies.