The Overall Effect of the Business Cycle on Crime

Bushway, Shawn D.; Phillips, Matthew; Cook, Philip J.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0475.2012.00578.x

Cited by 27 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Empirical studies have found that the effect of real economic activity is different between different types of crimes. Property crimes, violence crimes, and sex crimes are countercyclical, while the reverse is true for economic crimes due to increasing opportunity during economic expansions (Bushway et al 2012;Krüger 2011;Povel et al 2007); for example, Detotto and Otranto (2012) have recently found that economic crimes, including bankruptcy frauds, display a sensitivity to macro-economic conditions. Overall, we could expect a negative relationship between changes in bankruptcies and changes in economic growth: bankruptcies increase during economic downturns and recessions and are reduced during economic upturns.…”

Section: Data and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Destructive entrepreneurship in the small business sector: bankruptcy fraud in Sweden, 1830–2010

2018

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Entrepreneurship will not always productive: Baumol (1990Baumol ( , 1993 distinguishes between productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurial activities, and in the last two cases, new values are not created. Setting of from the notion of destructive entrepreneurship and the bankruptcy institute as framework for the empirical analysis, we use long aggregate series on bankruptcies and bankruptcy frauds in Sweden, 1830-2010. We operationalize destructive entrepreneurship with bankruptcy frauds. The bankruptcy institute is not a pure cleansing mechanism; assets can be redistributed by criminal procedure. Thus, a form of destructive entrepreneurship can be conducted within this system. We link bankruptcy frauds to the selection mechanism-the aggregate bankruptcy volume-over time. We cannot establish any direct linkages between the bankruptcy volume and institutional changes. However, and in line with research on bankruptcy diffusion and diffusion of economic crimes, we find that bankruptcy frauds have significant, positive impacts on the bankruptcy volume. Therefore, our results indicate that increases in bankruptcy frauds, destructive entrepreneurship, would affect the economic system.

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Section: Data and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Destructive entrepreneurship in the small business sector: bankruptcy fraud in Sweden, 1830–2010

2018

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“…But the property crime point estimates are in the opposite direction and sometimes statistically significant (if not entirely robust), which under-measurement seems unlikely to explain. Additionally, other interventions at the individual level often push violence in a di erent direction from other crimes (Kling et al, 2005;Deming, 2011;Jacob and Lefgren, 2003), and changes in labor market and macroeconomic conditions seem to a ect property but not violent crime (Raphael and Winter-Ebmer, 2001;Bushway et al, 2012). So violence may just be di erent.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the Benefits of Youth Employment Programs: The Heterogeneous Effects of Summer Jobs

Davis

Heller

2017

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This paper reports the results of two randomized field experiments, each offering different populations of youth a supported summer job in Chicago. In both experiments, the program dramatically reduces violent-crime arrests, even after the summer. It does so without improving employment, schooling, or other types of crime; if anything, property crime increases over 2-3 post-program years. To explore mechanisms, we implement a machine learning method that predicts treatment heterogeneity using observables. The method identifies a subgroup of youth with positive employment impacts, whose characteristics differ from the disconnected youth served in most employment programs. We find that employment benefiters commit more property crime than their control counterparts, and non-benefiters also show a decline in violent crime. These results do not seem consistent with typical theory about improved human capital and better labor market opportunities creating a higher opportunity cost of crime, or even with the idea that these programs just keep youth busy. We discuss several alternative mechanisms, concluding that brief youth employment programs can generate substantively important behavioral change, but for different outcomes, different youth, and different reasons than those most often considered in the literature.

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“…A "minus" is given if the post peak rate of change is less than the annual rate of change during expansion. If the business cycle has no impact on the series we expect a 50 % probability (Bushway et al (2012)) of both signs. The other test is a simple t-test of the hypothesis that the average of the growth rates of the respective time series is equal in recession and non-recession phases.…”

Section: Recession Phasesmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Firstly, we follow the method applied by Bushway et al (2012) to analyze the cyclical behavior of crime and calculate the cumulated changes of the time series during a downswing from peak to trough. Here, each business cycle is treated as an independent experimental trial.…”

Section: Recession Phasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are There Business Cycles “beyond GDP”? Alternative Measures to GDP at Business Cycle Frequencies

Döpke¹,

Maschke²

2015

Applied Economics Quarterly

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractWe discuss properties of alternatives or complements to GDP as a measure of welfare at business cycle frequencies. We argue that these figures are not useful to measure the welfare costs of business cycles. First, data is not available at an appropriate quality and frequency. Second, since the suggested time series sometimes correlate negatively with each other composite indices will lead by construction to very low welfare costs of business cycles. Third, cross-section and quasi-panel evidence based on different samples of countries reveals no impact of the stance of the business cycle on some suggested welfare measures. JEL-Classification: D06, E01, E32, I31

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The Overall Effect of the Business Cycle on Crime

Cited by 27 publications

References 21 publications

Destructive entrepreneurship in the small business sector: bankruptcy fraud in Sweden, 1830–2010

Destructive entrepreneurship in the small business sector: bankruptcy fraud in Sweden, 1830–2010

Rethinking the Benefits of Youth Employment Programs: The Heterogeneous Effects of Summer Jobs

Are There Business Cycles “beyond GDP”? Alternative Measures to GDP at Business Cycle Frequencies

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