published in: International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 2014, 8(2), 262-283
Two alternative hypotheses – referred to as opportunity- and stigma-based behavior – suggest that the relationship between unemployment and crime also depends on preexisting local crime levels. In order to analyze conjectured nonlinearities between both variables, we are using quantile regressions applied to German county panel data. While both conventional OLS and quantile regressions confirm the positive link between unemployment and crime for property crimes, results for assault differ with respect to the method of estimation. Whereas conventional mean regressions do not show any significant effect (which would confirm the usual result found for violent crimes in the literature), quantile regression uncovers that size and importance of the relationship are conditional on the crime rate: The partial effect is significantly positive for moderately low and median quantiles of local assault rates.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.