Relations between Known Crime and Police Spending in Large United States Cities

Abstract

Among 130 large U.S. cities, strong support is found for Turk's (1973) view of relatione between various collective needs and subsequent supplies. That such relations reflect the availability of linkage within the city—as Turk holds they do—is strongly suggested here when per capita known violent crime and per capita police spending are seen, respectively, as measures of need and supply. The positive correlation between these two rates is always stronger among high linkage than among low linkage cities, whichever of five indices is used to measure linkage. Evidence is cited to justify viewing known violent crime as causally prior to police spending, rather than vice versa. Controlling the effects of five potentially confounding variables fails to disturb the findings.     

THE EFFECTS OF ASSET PURCHASES AND NORMALIZATION OF U.S. MONETARY POLICY

This paper examines changes in the effects of unconventional monetary policies in the United States. To this end, we estimate a Markov-switching VAR model with absorbing regimes to capture possible structural changes. Our results detect regime changes around the beginning of 2011 and the middle of 2013. Before 2011, the U.S. large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) had relatively large impacts on the real economy and prices, but after the middle of 2013, their effects were weaker and less-persistent. In addition, after the middle of 2013, which includes the monetary policy normalization period, the asset purchase (or balance sheet) shocks had slightly weaker effects than during the early stage of the LSAPs but stronger effects than during the late stage of the LSAPs, while interest rate shocks had insignificant effects on the real economy and prices. Finally, our results suggest that the positive responses of durables and capital goods expenditures to interest rate shocks weakened the negative impacts of interest rate hikes after the middle of 2013 including the period of monetary policy normalization. (JEL C32, E21, E52)     

Persistence of Suburban Violent Crime Rates: An Ecological Analysis

Abstract

A lagged endogenous variable structural model of 1970 suburban violent crime rates is constructed and evaluated using a sample of 252 large suburbs for which 1960 and 1970 official crime data were available. It was found that suburban crime rates are persistent, that employment specialization and percent low income affect change in violent crime rates, and that suburban age, density, employment specialization, percent low income, percent Black, and region have substantial indirect effects on 1970 crime rates through earlier areal crime rates. Despite theoretical expectations, population growth and age composition exerted no significant direct or indirect effects on violent crime or changes in violent crime rates.     

Effects of Homelessness and Child Maltreatment on the Likelihood of Engaging in Property and Violent Crime During Adulthood

The current study employs data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 10,818; 56% female; 21% African American) to test how experiencing homelessness through emerging adulthood and child maltreatment predict adult property crime and violent crime. Unlike many published studies on homelessness, we used propensity score matching to correct for selection bias between homeless and nonhomeless individuals. Logistic regression models were run to predict violent and property crime in adulthood, controlling for child maltreatment. Participants who experienced homelessness by age 26 were 1.6 times more likely to commit violent crime in adulthood and almost 30% more likely to commit property crime. Those who were victims of child maltreatment were 15 times more likely to commit property crime, but no more likely to commit violent crime. Findings show that comparing statistically equivalent groups, homelessness through emerging adulthood significantly predicted adult criminality while child maltreatment showed more variable results. Greater prevention efforts aimed at children and adolescents at high risk of experiencing homelessness, as well as more intensive outreach services to homeless youth, may moderate exposure and reduce reliance on criminal survival behaviors.     

CONSUMPTION,SENTIMENT, AND ECONOMIC NEWS

This paper investigates the influence of economic news on consumer sentiment, and examines whether “news shocks”—changes in coverage that would not be expected from incoming data on economic fundamentals—have aggregate effects. Using monthly U.S. data and a structural vector autoregression, I find that (1) sentiment is affected by news shocks; (2) after filtering out effects of news shocks, shocks to sentiment still have positive effects on consumer spending; and (3) news shocks influence both spending and unemployment in significant, though transitory ways. These results are consistent with other evidence of a role of nonfundamental factors in aggregate fluctuations. (JEL E21, E32, D12)     

Looking the Other Way: The Institutional Accommodation of Tree Theft

The chronic inattention of U.S. Forest Service police to persistent tree theft provides an opportunity to explore police nonenforcement as institutional patterns of accommodation to deviance. Pattern analysis of qualitative data reveals three patterns of accommodation defined as Assimilatory, Anticipatory, and Atrophic. Theses types of accommodation are based in organizational philosophy that reflects a shared meaning of the forest community that is inconsistent with traditional views of crime and police. Patterns of accommodation preserve the cultural closeness between the Forest Service and the forest community by withholding the formal label of crime and the associated consequences. Accommodation of deviance serves to preserve the image of the forest community as a desirable place, frequented by honest people, requiring minimal policing.     

The relationship between lead and crime

This study investigates the association between air-lead levels and crime rates across 2,772 U.S. counties. Data for the analysis come from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Census, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Results suggest that air-lead levels have a direct effect on property and violent crime rates even after adjusting for general levels of air pollution and several structural covariates of crime. We also find that resource deprivation interacts with air-lead levels. The association between air-lead levels and crime rates-property and violent-is strongest in counties that have high levels of resource deprivation and weakest in counties that have low levels of deprivation. This interaction is consistent with arguments and evidence in the health care literature that populations most at risk of lead poisoning are least likely to get the resources required to prevent, screen, and treat the illness.     

America's Foreign Wars and the Legitimation of Domestic Violence

Do wars between nations encourage violence on the home front by legitimating violence? A time series regression analysis of U. S. homicide trends from 1947 to 1978 shows that neither war years nor postwar years show significantly higher homicide levels than other years, other things being equal. In the U. S., those postwar years which showed higher violence rates, after the Vietnam War, had higher violence levels only because of higher proportions of the population in the high-violence ages, lower criminal justice system effectiveness in crime control, and other differences which characterized those years. Survey research findings support the conclusion that violent actions of government agents like soldiers and police officers, on the one hand, and violent actions by private citizens, on the other hand, lie in distinct and separate cognitive categories for most Americans. Consequently there is little reason to expect that governmental violence serves to legitimate, or exerts a modelling influence on, violent behavior of private individuals in the U. S. Official killing by the state makes killing respectable. It not merely dulls the sensibilities of people to cruelty and inhumanity but actually stimulates cruelty.     

UNDERSTANDING THE MACROECONOMIC IMPACT OF ILLIQUIDITY SHOCKS IN THE UNITED STATES

In this paper, we empirically investigate the role of stock market illiquidity shocks, stemming from Amihud's illiquidity measure, in explaining U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations from 1973 to 2018. We find that the impact of illiquidity shocks on economic activity is substantial, and historical decomposition analysis shows that cumulative illiquidity shocks were an essential contributor to the prolonged economic slump of the Great Recession. Moreover, our identified illiquidity shocks represent a distinct source of macroeconomic instability. This suggests that illiquidity shocks, measured by the stock price impacts, may contain more information than other types of shocks in recent studies, such as financial shocks and uncertainty shocks. (JEL C32, E32)     

Social Disorganization Theory and the Contextual Nature of Crime in Nonmetropolitan Counties*

Abstract This research explores violent and property crime rates in nonmetropolitan counties. It is argued that crime rates are lower in these counties because of higher levels of social integration. We test the hypothesis that predictors of crime from social disorganization theory exert different effects on violent and property crimes at different levels of population change in nonmetropolitan counties. We use a spatial lag regression model to predict the 1989–1991 average violent and property crime rates for these counties, taken from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The results show that a factor‐analyzed index of resource disadvantage (poverty rate, income inequality, unemployment, percent female‐headed households) has different effects on both violent and property crime at different levels of population change in nonmetropolitan counties. Contrary to expectations, we find that resource disadvantage exerts a greater positive effect on both violent and property crimes in nonmetropolitan counties that lost population between 1980 and 1990. Implications for theory and research are discussed.     

Does a helping hand put others at risk?: affirmative action,police departments,and crime

Will increasing the number of minority and women police officers make law enforcement more effective by drawing on abilities that have gone untapped and creating better contact with communities and victims? Or will standards have to be lowered too far before large numbers of minorities and women can be hired? Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for U.S. cities for 1987, 1990, and 1993, I find that hiring more black and minority police officers increases crime rates, but this apparently arises because lower hiring standards involved in recruiting more minority officers reduces the quality of both new minority and new nonminority officers. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the areas most heavily populated by blacks. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when more women are hired, and this raises questions about whether norming tests or altering their content to create equal pass rates is preferable. The article examines how the changing composition of police departments affects such measures as the murder of and assaults against police officers.     

CAN MONETARY POLICY INFLUENCE LONG‐TERM INTEREST RATES? IT DEPENDS

Can monetary policy influence long‐term interest rates? Studies that have tackled this question using vector autoregressions (VARs) generally find that monetary policy's influence on long‐term interest rates is small and often statistically insignificant. Other studies, however, using a single‐equation approach, have found a robust relationship. Our study sheds new light on this question by estimating the effect of monetary policy shocks on long‐term interest rates in a VAR with long‐run monetary neutrality restrictions. We find that U.S. monetary policy can strongly influence long‐term interest rates, but only when the Federal Reserve has inflation‐fighting credibility and is able to firmly anchor inflationary expectations. (JEL E43, E51, E52)     

INTERNATIONAL EFFECTS OF EURO AREA VERSUS U.S. POLICY UNCERTAINTY: A FAVAR APPROACH

Estimating a large‐scale factor‐augmented vector autoregressive model for 18 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development member countries, we quantify the global effects of economic policy uncertainty shocks. More specifically, we check whether the signs, the magnitude, and the persistence profile are consistent with the literature on the real and financial sector effects of uncertainty. In that respect, we compare the impacts of a U.S. and a Euro area policy uncertainty shock. According to our results, an increase in economic policy uncertainty has a strong negative impact on economic activity (gross domestic product), consumer prices, equity prices, and interest rates. Uncertainty shocks cause deeper recessions in Continental Europe (except Germany) than in Anglo‐Saxon countries. U.S. uncertainty shocks have a bigger impact than those for the Euro area. Economic policy uncertainty does not only affect that country where the shock originates but also has large cross‐border effects. We also find a high degree of synchronization among the responses of national variables to a (foreign) uncertainty shock, indicating evidence of an international business cycle. With respect to the responses of national long‐term interest rates to an economic policy uncertainty shock, our results reveal a strong “North‐South” divide within the Euro area with rates decreasing less significantly in the South. Moreover, economic policy uncertainty shocks emerging in one region quickly raise uncertainty outside the region of origin. (JEL C32, F42, D80)     

THE RELATIVE STICKINESS OF WAGES AND PRICES

While many modern business cycle theories posit the existence of nominal wage and/or output price stickiness, their relative importance remains an unsettled issue. Using a structural VAR model, this paper exploits evidence on the behavior of real wages to assess the relative importance of these two sources of stickiness. The empirical results suggest that a positive shock to aggregate demand causes a significant temporary fall in real wages. This is taken as evidence that sticky wages have played a more important role than sticky prices in transmitting aggregate demand shocks to real economic activity in the post-war U.S. (JEL E32)     

URBANIZED PERIPHERIES: A REGIONAL STUDY OF CRIME IN ISRAEL

This study explores the regional patterns of crime in Israel for the first time. It examines crime rates and interregional crime by comparing the home region of offenders and the region of the offense. In a society small in size and population, urbanization has a limited impact on crime rates. This analysis, based on variables drawn from a national census and police crime statistics, stresses three types of peripheral region: regions that "attract" property offenses, regions that "export" property offenders, and regions of a "typical" peripheral nature. However, the findings indicate that some urban characteristics serve to shape the crime situation in peripheral regions. It is suggested that regional variations in crime are best explained by a multicausality approach.     

THE EFFECTS OF ASSET FORFEITURE ON POLICING: A PANEL APPROACH

Asset forfeiture has proven highly controversial in the United States since its expansion in 1984. Most contentious is the widespread policy that allows police agencies to keep the assets seized, which both proponents and critics assert changes police behavior. From newly developed panel data sets, we find some statistical support for the proposition that police agencies change the intensity and pattern of policing in response to forfeiture. However, in economic terms these effects are very weak and do not support the proposition that forfeiture provides vital funds and incentives for crime policing. (JEL H39, H71, K42)     

PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS OF PUBLIC CAPITAL MAINTENANCE: EVIDENCE FROM U.S. STATES

This article assesses the productivity effects of infrastructure operation and maintenance (O&M) spending by state and local governments in the 48 contiguous U.S. states over the period 1978–2000. We explicitly account for transboundary spillovers of capital and O&M spending and follow a semiparametric methodology that allows us to estimate state‐specific output elasticities. We find strong evidence that in all 48 states the cross‐state spillover effects of O&M outlays on productivity exceed their within‐state impacts and are substantially higher than the spillover effects of capital expenditure. (JEL C14, E22, E62, H76, O11, O47, R11)     

TWIN SONS OF DIFFERENT MOTHERS: THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF THE TWIN DEFICITS DEBATE

Interest in the twin deficits hypothesis fluctuates in tandem with the U.S. current account deficit. Surprisingly though, a statistically robust relationship between budget and trade deficits has been difficult to pin down. We argue that a big part of this difficulty is due to the failure to allow for structural breaks in the series when (either explicitly or implicitly) modeling their time series properties. We show that both series are break stationary (and conditionally heteroskedastic) and argue that while there is no common pattern in the long run, the short-run dynamics reveal a sizeable and fairly persistent positive relationship between budget deficit shocks and current account deficit shocks. ( JEL F41, E6, H6)     

THE SHIFTS IN LEAD-LAG PROPERTIES OF THE U.S. BUSINESS CYCLE

We document shifts in the lead-lag properties of the U.S. business cycle since the mid-1980s. Specifically, (1) the well-known inverted leading indicator property of real interest rates has completely vanished; (2) labor productivity switched from positively leading to negatively lagging output and labor inputs over the cycle; and (3) the unemployment rate shifted from lagging productivity negatively to leading positively. Many contemporary business cycle models produce counterfactual cross-correlations revealing that popular frictions and shocks provide an incomplete account of business cycle comovement. Determining the underlying sources of these shifts in the lead-lag properties and their consequences for macroeconomic forecasts is therefore a promising direction for future research. (JEL E24, E32, E43)     

Culture,Region, and Cross‐National Violent Crime

Past cross‐national crime research has focused on structural factors with considerably less attention paid to cultural predictors. We extend the culture of honor thesis by identifying the importance of cultural gender inequality and test a direct measure of it on cross‐national violent crime rates. While prior research typically uses regional variables as proxies for culture, by using a direct cultural measure we are also able to identify whether culture contributes to explaining the regional associations found previously. Based on national surveys of 153 nations and more than a million respondents, this study is able to explore cultural, structural, and regional predictors of violent crime rates cross‐nationally. Two regions, Latin America and sub‐Saharan Africa, are far above the rest of the world in terms of violent crime rates. It turns out that most of the standard structural variables found to be important in previous cross‐national studies no longer have significant effects when controls for these two regions are imposed. On the other hand, we find that our measure of cultural gender inequality has one of the largest associations with violent crime rates, net of region, and also explains portions of both regional associations.