Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/80557 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 7545
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Crime has been argued to have important externalities. We investigate the relationship between violent crime and an important type of behaviour: individuals' participation in their local area through walking and physical activity. We use a sample of nearly 1 million people residing in over 320 small areas in England between 2005 and 2011. We show that concerns about personal safety co-move with police recorded violent crime. To identify the causal effect of recorded violent crime on walking and other physical activity we control for individual-level characteristics, non-time varying local authority effects, national time effects and local authority-specific trends. In addition, we exploit a natural experiment that caused a sudden increase in crime - the 2011 England riots - to identify the causal impact of a large exogenous crime shock on physical activity in a triple difference framework. Our results show a substantive deterrent effect of local area violent crime on walking, pointing to important effects of violent crime on non-victims. The adverse effect of an increase in local area violent crime from the 25th to the 75th percentile on walking is equivalent in size to a 6êC fall in average minimum temperature.
Subjects: 
violent crime
walking
physical activity
riots
JEL: 
I12
I18
R23
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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