THE COST OF CRIME PROJECT
Estimating the economic and social cost of crime
Motivation
In 2017, more than 63,880 people were killed in homicides in Brazil. This equates to roughly 7 violent death per hour and sets an unprecedented record of violent crime in the country. In the 2017 Latinobarometer, 44% of Brazilians reported to have been victim of crime and fear of crime and public security rank high as concerns in Brazil and other countries in Latin America.
Mission
In this project we provide novel estimates on the economic and social cost of crime using cutting edge econometric techniques on large sets of administrative microdata from Brazil. We are particularly interested in documenting the cost of crime so far neglected in the literature and are absent from official cost estimates and often hidden for policy makers. Unique access to georeferenced crime data allows us to investigate the spatial dimension of exposure to crime and violence on a number of outcomes, including education, health, house prices and political outcomes.
Data
We have access to a unique set of high quality administrative microdata on violence and crime from Brazilian government agencies. We combine the information on crime with administrative data on economic performance, educational outcomes, health realizations, outcomes of political processes among other.
We use information on the location of homicides in the public way to obtain the precise geocoordinates of incidents of crime over time. We display these on our Homicide Map, documenting the occurrence of all homicides in the public way in Brazil over time and across space at an unprecedented level of geographic precision.
PAPERS
Publications and Working Papers
VIOLENCE AND HUMAN CAPITAL INVESTMENTS
VIOLENCE AND BIRTH OUTCOMES: EVIDENCE FROM HOMICIDES IN BRAZIL
Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner & Marco Manacorda, Journal of Development Economics, Volume 119, March 2016, Pages 16-33
This paper uses microdata from Brazilian vital statistics on births and deaths between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence – measured by homicide rates – on birth outcomes. The estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of pregnancy leads to a small but precisely estimated increase in the risk of low birthweight and prematurity. Effects are found both in small municipalities, where homicides are rare, and in large municipalities, where violence is endemic, and are particularly pronounced among children of poorly educated mothers, implying that violence compounds the disadvantage that these children already suffer as a result of their households' lower socioeconomic status.
Paper: PDF
Data: ZIP
Code: ZIP
ESTIMATING THE EFFECT OF CRIMINAL VICTIMISATION ON BIRTH OUTCOMES.
Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner & Livia Menezes
In this paper, we investigate the effect of exposure to homicides on the educational performance and human capital investments of students in Brazil. We combine extremely granular information on the location and timing of homicides with a number of very large administrative educational datasets, to estimate the effect of exposure to homicides around schools, students' residence, and on their way to school on these outcomes. We show that violence has a detrimental effect on school attendance, on standardised test scores in math and Portuguese language and increases dropout rates of students substantially. The effects are particularly pronounced for boys, indicating important heterogeneous effects of violence. We use exceptionally rich information from student- and parent-background questionnaires to investigate the effect of violence on the aspirations and attitudes towards education. In line with the effects on dropout and the longer-term human capital accumulation of students, we find that boys systematically report lower educational aspiration towards education. Making use of the very rich information from the homicides and education data, we explore a number of underlying transmission channels, including mechanisms related to school supply, bereavement and incentives for human capital investments.
Feature: IZA Newsroom
We study the effect of individual criminal victimisation in robbery and theft on birth outcomes using a unique dataset from Brazil combining information on birth records with information on criminal victimization . We find that victimisation in robbery during the first trimester reduces birthweight substantially, by about 60 grams (10 percent of a standard deviation in birthweight) and increases the likelihood for low birthweight by about 40 percent compared to the baseline. The results are robust to the inclusion of place of residence, hospital and time fixed effects and to the inclusion of a very large array of mother and pregnancy characteristics. We also show that victimisation leads to a substantial increase in fetal deaths and a positive selection of live births, hence likely providing a lower bound of the estimated effects on birthweight. Using the very rich information on victimization and health at birth we shed light on the mechanism underlying the estimated relationship.
Paper: PDF
Ongoing projects:
Crime and Productivity (Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner & Livia Menezes)
Crime and House Prices (Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner, Livia Menezes & Francisco Nobre)
Violence and Political Outcomes (Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner & Livia Menezes)
Violence and Health Outcomes (Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner & Livia Menezes)
Other related work:
The Impact of Household Shocks on Domestic Violence: Evidence from Tanzania (Olukorede Abiona & Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner)
Project 360: An intervention to address victim-police engagement in repeat domestic violence cases (Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner, Jesse Matheson & Reka Plugor)
Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner & Livia Menezes, forthcoming at Journal of Labor Economics.
TEAM
MARTIN FOUREAUX KOPPENSTEINER
Associate professor in economics
Principal Investigator
Principal Investigator
Collaborators:
Prof. Marco Manacorda, Queen Mary University of London & LSE
Dr Aline Menezes, UFRJ
Francisco Nobre, University of Surrey
Map development: Tomislav Bacinger
Funding:
British Academy
Inter-American Development Bank
Global Challenges Research Fund
DATA
Coming soon
School of Economics
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH
UK
CONTACT
