TY  - JOUR
AU  - Johnson,Ryan S.
AU  - Kantor,Shawn
AU  - Fishback,Price V.
TI  - Striking at the Roots of Crime: The Impact of Social Welfare Spending on Crime During the Great Depression
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12825
PY  - 2007
Y2  - January 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12825
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12825.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ryan Johnson
Department of Economics
Brigham Young University-Idaho
Rexburg, ID 83460
E-Mail: johnsonry@byui.edu

Shawn E. Kantor
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
University of California, Merced
5200 N. Lake Road
Merced, CA 95343
Tel: 209-228-2956
Fax: 209-228-4007
E-Mail: skantor@ucmerced.edu

Price V. Fishback
Department of Economics
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ  85721
Tel: 520/621-4421
Fax: 520/621-8450
E-Mail: pfishback@eller.arizona.edu
AB  - The Great Depression of the 1930s led contemporaries to worry that people hit by hard times would turn to crime in their efforts to survive. Franklin Roosevelt argued that the unprecedented and massive expansion in relief efforts “struck at the roots of crime” by providing subsistence income to needy families. After constructing a panel data set for 81 large American cities for the years 1930 through 1940, we estimate the impact of relief spending by all levels of government on crime rates. The analysis suggests that a ten percent increase in relief spending during the 1930s lowered property crime by roughly 1.5 percent. By limiting the amount of free time for relief recipients, work relief was more effective than direct relief in reducing crime. More generally, our results indicate that social insurance, which tends to be understudied in economic analyses of crime, should be more explicitly and more carefully incorporated into the analysis of temporal and spatial variations in criminal activity.
ER  -