Violent crime rates: The influence of city age: Fid-Bau Portal

Violent crime rates: The influence of city age

Chapman, Jeffrey I.

Abstract This paper examines the effects of city age on a specific city characteristic--the violent crime rate of that city. As such it has five basic parts: an introduction, a summary of a model of violent crime which has been previously developed, a development of a theoretical model of the effects of age on violent crime, a specification and testing of that model, and a conclusion. Although city age has recently become of interest to urban economists, there has been little work which uses it as an explanatory variable of violent crime. Before the direct effect of age can be determined, the model of violent crime must first be examined. This paper summarizes a model previously developed, which relates the violent crime rate to economic and demographic variables, using the tools of utility maximization. Using two stage least squares to account for simultaneity bias, a model of violent crime was estimated. In the third section of the paper, a model of aging was developed. This model utilizes the dynamics of citizens making residential decisions based on the price of housing and the costs of commuting. From this model it is possible to make a prediction of how age of cities is related to the crime rate: as age increases, crime should increase, but, at some point, after the city reaches a certain age, the crime rate will fall. After the model is postulated, it is operationalized. Seventy-seven California cities were selected and placed in different age of city categories. Then, the crime model was re-estimated, using the age categories as dummy variables. It was found that, for the most part, the age dummy variables were as predicted in terms of size, and that their inclusion did significantly reduce the sum of squared residuals. Thus, it was concluded that this line of analysis may be a profitable area for future research.