Local Access to Mental Healthcare and Crime
Working Paper 27619
DOI 10.3386/w27619
Issue Date
We estimate the effect of local access to office-based mental healthcare on crime. We leverage variation in the number of mental healthcare offices within a county over the period 1999 to 2014 in a two-way fixed-effects model. We find that increases in the number of mental healthcare offices modestly reduce crime. In particular, ten additional offices in a county reduces crime by 1.7 crimes per 10,000 residents. These findings suggest an unintended benefit from expanding the office-based mental healthcare workforce: reductions in crime.
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Copy CitationMonica Deza, Johanna Catherine Maclean, and Keisha T. Solomon, "Local Access to Mental Healthcare and Crime," NBER Working Paper 27619 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3386/w27619.
Published Versions
Monica Deza & Johanna Catherine Maclean & Keisha Solomon, 2021. "Local access to mental healthcare and crime," Journal of Urban Economics, .