Losing by Less? Import Competition, Unemployment Insurance Generosity, and Crime

Abstract

Increased import competition from China has brought about a host of negative consequences for the most exposed industries and labor markets. Do social programs attenuate these harmful effects? We examine changes in import competition between 1990 and 2007, taking crime as our outcome of interest and unemployment insurance as our mitigating program. We find strong evidence that counties with access to more generous unemployment insurance experienced relatively smaller increases in tradeinduced property crime. This highlights a new and important positive externality of unemployment insurance. (JEL H00, R10)

Economic Shocks and Crime: Evidence from the Brazilian Trade Liberalization

“…In contrast to the Bartik shocks typically used as local labor demand shifters in this literature, we know precisely the source of the shock (changes in import tariffs), providing a more transparent source of exogenous variation. 7 Our results suggest that these Bartik shocks are unlikely to satisfy the exclusion restriction required by an instrumental variables estimator. The combination of our natural experiment with our empirical strategy allows us to make progress relative to the previous literature and to provide bounds on the effect of local labor market conditions on crime.…”

“…Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015) also investigate the relationship between shocks to human populations and violence, but they focus on the effect of weather shocks on conflicts. Conflict and common crime are somewhat different phenomena and our paper pays particular attention to the role of labor market conditions in driving crime, so our focus is different from theirs 7 Bartik (1991). predicts changes in local labor demand based on national changes in industry-specific employment and wages and on each region's initial industrial structure.…”

The effect of unemployment insurance on the safety net and infant health in the USA

“…In the one-year period between 2008 and 2009 total claims increased from around three to six million. The slow economic recovery accompanied by larger payments and longer duration of payments stimulated a strand of studies revisiting the social costs and benefits of the UI programme (Barr and Turner, 2015;Bitler and Hoynes, 2016;Card et al, 2015a;Mueller, Rothstein, and Wachter, 2016), as well as its unintended and unplanned externalities on other outcomes including crime (Beach and Lopresti, 2019), foreclosure (Hsu, Matsa, and Melzer, 2018), alcohol abuse (Lantis and Teahan, 2018), cigarette smoking (Fu and Liu, 2019), health (Kuka, 2018), mental health (Tefft, 2011a), college enrolment (Barr and Turner, 2015), and children's educational outcomes (Regmi, 2019).…”

The effect of health insurance on crime: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion

“…The first two derive from Medicaid's nature as a government transfer program. A large literature suggests that government transfer programs have been effective in reducing recidivism and crime (Berk et al, 1980;Berk and Rauma, 1983;Yang, 2017;Beach and Lopresti, 2019;Carr and Packham, 2019;Foley, 2011;Mallar and Thornton, 1978;Palmer et al, 2019;Tuttle, 2019). 1 These crime effects appear to be driven by the income transfer features of these programs, which do two related things: they make life outside of prison better, increasing the incentives to avoid crime that may result in prison; and they provide financial security, which decreases the need to resort to crime to make ends meet.…”