Juvenile crime in Spain

Abstract

This article studies the role of age structure and gender on crime rates across Spanish regions. Using a regional dataset for the period 1993 to 2003, and after controlling for social and economic factors such as unemployment, urbanization, migration, regional welfare and economic development, results support the existence of an age-crime profile: Spanish youngsters are more prone to commit crime.

Notes

¹Buonanno and Montolio (2005), Rodríguez (2003) and Bandrés and Diez-Ticio (2001) represent few notable exceptions.

²Spain has 17 regions. We do not include the Basque Country in our sample because it has its own police forces and crime figures are not included in the Spanish Home Office data base.

³We use this distinction to study the relative importance of the determinats of property crimes with respect total crime rates.

⁴As stressed by Cherry and List (2002) ‘it is inappropriate to pool crime types into a single decision model … much of the existing empirical estimates suffers from aggregation bias' (p. 81).