Theft in Price-Volatile Markets: On the Relationship between Copper Price and Copper Theft (original) (raw)

The when and where of an emerging crime type: The example of metal theft from the railway network of Great Britain

Metal theft has become an increasingly common crime in recent years, but lack of data has limited research into it. The present study used police-recorded crime data to study the spatial and temporal concentration of metal theft from the railway network of Great Britain. Metal theft was found to exhibit only weak seasonality, to be concentrated at night and to cluster in a few locations close to – but not in – major cities. Repeat-victimisation risk continued for longer than has been found for other crime types. These and other features appear to point to metal theft being a planned, rather than opportunistic, offence and to the role of scrap-metal dealers as facilitators.

The Effect of Stolen Goods Markets on Crime: Evidence from a Quasi - Natural Experiment

2014

This paper analyses the causal effect of the availability of stolen goods markets on theft crimes. Motivated by the richness of anecdotal evidence, we study this overlooked determinant of crime’s production function through the lens of pawnshops, a widespread business that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as collateral. The endogeneity of pawnshops to crime is addressed in multiple ways. First, we strengthen the hypothesis that pawnshops deal with stolen goods by exploiting the properties of a panel of 2176 US counties from 1997 to 2010. Then, we detect causality exploiting the exogenous rise in the price of gold in a quasi - natural experiment fashion. Specifically, the identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of the interaction between the price of gold, constantly demanded by pawnbrokers in the form of jewels that are melted down to be transformed in a bar of precious metal, and the initial concentration of pawnshops to the county. Cons...

Asian Gold – Expected Returns to Crime and Thieves Behaviour

2017

A rational criminal seeks to maximise the expected benefits from illegal activity. We investigate whether criminals reallocate efforts towards potential targets with higher expected payoffs following exogenous changes in goods prices. Our identification strategy relies on the common perception in the UK that families of South Asian descent keep a substantial amount of gold in their houses. The expected gains from targeting these households for burglaries consequently change with the gold price. Using a differencein-difference approach we combine crime data from UK police forces with census information and official gold prices. Our analysis indicates that areas with a large share of South Asians face a disproportionate increase in property crime relative to other neighbourhoods in the same local authority when the price of gold increases. JEL classification: K42; J19

Nber Working Paper Series Crime and Durable Goods

2016

Crime and the durability of goods are strongly connected issues. However, surprisingly, they have been studied separately. This paper explores the relationship between the production of durable goods and crime from a theoretical perspective and draws important conclusions for both topics. Crime affects the consumer and producer surplus and thus the behavior of consumers, firms, the market equilibrium, and, in turn, the social optimum. Lower durability of goods reduces the incentive to steal those goods, thus reducing crime. When crime is included in the standard framework of durable goods, the socially optimal durability level is lower. Even without considering the negative non-market externalities of crime, perfect competition does not provide the optimal durability level. When considering different stealing technologies, perfect competition either over-produces durability or produces zero (minimum) durability. The monopolist under-produces durability regardless of the stealing tec...

The influence of changing reward of electronic consumer goods on burglary and theft offences in Western market-based countries in the years prior to and during the crime drop

Crime Science, 2021

It is widely recognised that burglary and theft offence trends have broadly moved in parallel in ‘Western’ market-based countries since the 1950s. Most researchers have focussed on the trend from the early 1990s onwards, when burglary and theft offence rates plummeted. One major proposed explanation for this trend, relates to improved security. This paper draws on the longitudinal variations in reward of electronic consumer goods to propose a complementary account. This argument is supported by criminological theory, empirical evidence, and historical trends of specific property crime offences. The paper concludes by explaining that reward and security operate in partnership to influence the opportunity for crime, which provides an optimal account for burglary and theft offence trends over the last 40 years.

An Economic Approach to Motor Vehicle Theft

Berkeley Program in Law & Economics, 2010

Motor vehicle theft costs dearly to the Australian economy. Conservative estimates have put the annual cost of this form of illegal activity at 654 million during 1996. A number of initiatives aimed at reducing the incidence and cost of car theft have been implemented in recent years, yet statistics indicate that car theft is on the increase. Several authors have proposed an integrated approach to the regulation of markets for stolen property. Understanding property crime as a market is central to identifying approaches to its control. This paper discusses an industry model of crime and develops it on Australian data. Our model is an adaptation of one originally proposed by Vandeale (1978). It considers a production sector that uses inputs from a market of illegal labour to generate a supply of illegal goods that are traded in a product market. These sectors interact with each other and with a criminal justice sector. The model is applied to the analysis of car theft in Queensland.

Theoretical and empirical work on the relationship between unemployment and crime

2001

Part of the ongoing debate between Cantor and Land and Greenberg centers on differing opinions about the question of interest in . We begin this article with our opinion that Cantor and Land's theory relates changes in the business cycle to changes in the aggregate rate of crime. We then question whether year-to-year changes adequately reflect changes in the business cycle, which last on average 4 years, and we refer to an article by which presents an alternative method of measuring business cycle changes. We also discuss how Greenberg's use of cointegration provides an alternative way of addressing the difficult statistical problem of nonstationarity without resorting to first differences. Our final contribution involves noticing that opportunity and motivational theories of crime can be structurally identified by focusing on different types of crime rather than temporal lags. We demonstrate this idea by splitting car theft into joyriding and theft for profit. We show that joyriding appears to be driven by opportunity, while the causal structure of theft for profit is less clear.