Arnaud Chevalier and his co-authors published the paper “Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location” in the IZA Discussion Paper Series.
The authors provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Their identification strategy relies on the widely held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Using a neighbourhood-level panel on reported crime and difference-in-differences, they find that burglaries in South Asian neighbourhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighbourhoods in the same municipality, confirming that burglars react rationally to variations in the expected returns to their activities.
