An April 2016 Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) report advocated raising the minimum wage to deter crime. This recommendation rests on the assumption that minimum wage hikes increase the returns to legitimate labor market work while generating minimal adverse employment effects. This study comprehensively assesses the impact of minimum wages on crime using data from the 1998-2016 Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). Our results provide no evidence that minimum wage increases reduce crime. Instead, we find that raising the minimum wage increases property crime arrests among those ages 16-to-24, with an estimated elasticity of 0.2. This result is strongest in counties with over 100,000 residents and persists when we use longitudinal data to isolate workers for whom minimum wages bind. Our estimates suggest that a $15 Federal minimum wage could generate criminal externality costs of nearly $2.4 billion.

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In recent years, many schools have lifted their alcohol sales bans at college football games, possibly as a tool to increase attendance and revenues. However, spillovers to crime deserve consideration, given the research that links alcohol consumption and availability to crime. Alcohol sales may spill over to crime through their impacts on attendance, preferences for alcohol consumption among fans, and endogenous changes to policing and enforcement, although the net effect on crime is theoretically ambiguous. Using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) over the 2005 to 2016 period for law enforcement agencies that serve 33 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools, and utilizing difference-in-differences (DD) and triple-differences empirical strategies (leveraging variation in pre-vs. post-sales periods, home vs. away game days, and sales-adopting vs. non-adopting schools), I find that alcohol sales are associated with reductions in arrests for liquor law violations (83.5 percent) and disorderly conduct (81.0 percent) on home game days.

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