Events at CERGE-EI
Monday, 13 January, 2014 | 16:30 | Applied Micro Research Seminar
Dr. Mirko Draca: “The Changing Returns to Crime: Product-Level Evidence from the UK”
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Authors: Mirko Draca, Theodore Koutmeridis, and Stephen Machin
Abstract: In this paper we look at how property theft varies with the potential gain or return from crime. To do this, we study a new dataset from the London Metropolitan Police which records the number of thefts by the class of 2-digit product. We match this information on the quantity of thefts by product to item-level price information from the ONS retail price index (RPI). We estimate the elasticity of crime to (relative) price to be approximately 0.6 with lower elasticities for some crime sub-categories. In turn, we find that price variation explains 12% of the trend fall in thefts over the 2002-2012 period that we study.
