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
P.O. Box 2039
Merced, CA 95344
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 to dire circumstances for a large share of American households.  Contemporaries worried that a number of these households would commit property crimes in their efforts to survive the hard times.  The Roosevelt administration suggested that their unprecedented and massive relief efforts struck at the roots of crime by providing subsistence income to needy families.  After constructing a panel data set for 83 large American cities for the years 1930 through 1940, we estimated the impact of relief spending by all levels of government on crime rates.  The analysis suggests that relief spending during the 1930s lowered property crime in a statistically and economically significant way.  A lower bound ordinary least squares estimate suggests that a 10 percent increase in per capita relief spending during the Great Depression lowered property crime rates by close to 1 percent.  After controlling for potential endogeneity using an instrumental variables approach, the estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in per capita relief spending lowered crime rates by roughly 5.6 to 10 percent at the margin.  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  -