Crime and labour market turnover

ABSTRACT

We go beyond unemployment to investigate how its determinants, specifically hires, lay-offs and quits, affect crime. As expected, we find less crime in localities with higher hiring and quit rates and lower lay-off rates. The size of relationships is on the order of studies analysing the link between unemployment and crime.

KEYWORDS:

• Hires
• lay-offs
• quits
• separations
• wages
• unemployment
• property crime
• incarceration

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C41
• J0
• J64

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We investigated the effect of market tightness, or opening relative to unemployed, but did not find any statistically significant results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Holy Cross Research and Publications Grant.