Cashlessness and Street Crime: A Cross-national Study of Direct Deposit Payment and Robbery Rates

Abstract

Substantial variation in national crime rates suggests social structure and cultural context influence offending and victimization. Several prominent criminological theories anticipate a positive association between the prevalence of cash in a society and its rates of pecuniary crime. We examined the association between one form of “cashlessness” and national robbery rates across nations (n = 67), controlling for several structural covariates of national crime rates. We obtained data on robbery from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and data on government-based cashlessness from the Global Financial Inclusion Database. We found nations with higher levels of government-based cashlessness had lower robbery rates (β = −.41, p = .02). We also undertook several sensitivity analyses, including tests for a relationship with commercial cashlessness and for crimes like homicide and burglary. Our results suggest technological advancements that reduce cash in a society may have implications for a nation’s robbery rates.

Keywords:

• cash
• electronic financial transactions
• economy
• cross-national

Notes

¹ Electronic or digital payment systems lack a standardized definition, but both refer to transfers of value that are initiated and/or received using electronic devices and channels. These include debit cards, credit cards, electronic funds transfers, and e-commerce payment systems (Better Than Cash Alliance, 2016).

² Based on the results of the Shapiro–Wilk Test, quantile–quantile normal plots, and Tukey’s ladder, the distributions of robbery, homicide victimization, cashlessness, poverty, GDP, and sex ratio all became approximately normal after applying a natural logarithmic transformation. When the natural log transformation was applied to burglary rates, however, it was still not approximately normal. ATMs per 100 residents became approximately normally distributed after utilizing the square root transformation. The education index and percent urban were approximately normally distributed without transformation.

³ All data, Stata code, sensitivity analyses and results for this study are available online at the following location: https://sites.google.com/site/homicidedata/cashlessness-and-street-crime-a-cross-national-study-of-direct-deposit-payment-and-robbery-rates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Alex Pridemore

William Alex Pridemore is the Dean and distinguished professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany – State University of New York, where he is also affiliate faculty of the Department of Sociology and of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. His primary criminological research interests include social structure and violence, alcohol and violence, cross-national homicide rates, and rural criminology. He also carries out research on alcohol epidemiology, the sociology of health and illness.

Sean Patrick Roche

Sean Patrick Roche is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal justice at Texas State University. His primary research interests include public opinion on crime and justice issues, police and offender decision-making, and the relationship between social technologies and emerging trends in criminology and criminal justice.

Meghan L. Rogers

Meghan L. Rogers is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her research interests include cross-national research, violence, quantitative research methods, criminological theory, social structures and crime, and measurement of crime.