IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jeurec/v18y2020i2p1040-1077..html

Prices, Policing and Policy: The Dynamics of Crime Booms and Busts

Author

Listed:
  • Tom Kirchmaier
  • Stephen Machin
  • Matteo Sandi
  • Robert Witt

Abstract

In many historical episodes, criminal activity displays booms and busts. One clear example is the case of metal crime in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) where, in the face of big increases in value driven by world commodity prices, thefts rose very sharply in the 2000s, after which they fell. This paper studies the respective roles of prices, policing and policy in shaping this crime boom and bust. Separate study of each reveals metal crime being driven up via sizeable and significant metal crime–price elasticities and driven down by changes in policing and policy. A regression-based decomposition analysis confirms that all three of the hypothesised factors considered in the paper - prices, policing and policy - were empirically important in the different stages of metal theft's boom and bust.

Suggested Citation

  • Tom Kirchmaier & Stephen Machin & Matteo Sandi & Robert Witt, 2020. "Prices, Policing and Policy: The Dynamics of Crime Booms and Busts," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(2), pages 1040-1077.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:18:y:2020:i:2:p:1040-1077.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvz014
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yu Aoki & Theodore Koutmeridis, 2019. "Shaking Criminal Incentives," Working Papers 2019-13, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    2. Fetzer, Thiemo, 2023. "Did the policy response to the energy crisis cause crime? Evidence from England," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1459, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    3. Aoki, Yu & Koutmeridis, Theodore, 2019. "Shaking Criminal Incentives," IZA Discussion Papers 12781, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Foong, Gerald & Machin, Stephen & Sandi, Matteo, 2025. "Crime and Prices: Evidence from Thefts of Expensive Precious Metal," IZA Discussion Papers 18353, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Blesse, Sebastian & Diegmann, André, 2019. "Police reorganization and crime: Evidence from police station closures," ZEW Discussion Papers 18-044, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, revised 2019.
    6. Mancha, Andre, 2025. "Dismantling a market for stolen goods: Evidence from the regulation of junkyards in Brazil," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    7. repec:sus:susewp:1024 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Federico Masera, 2022. "The economics of policing and crimeThe economics of policing and crime," Chapters, in: Paolo Buonanno & Paolo Vanin & Juan Vargas (ed.), A Modern Guide to the Economics of Crime, chapter 2, pages 12-29, Edward Elgar Publishing.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:18:y:2020:i:2:p:1040-1077.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jeea .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.