This week's speaker is Roxana Elena Manea, PhD candidate in development economics, giving a talk entitled

Crime, Inequality and Development  in South Africa (co-authored with Patrizio Piraino and Martina Viarengo)

Abstract: Crime is one of the main issues on the minds of South Africans, and for good reason. The country ranks fifth worldwide in terms of its homicide rate (1996-2017). Nowadays, on a suburban block of 24 houses, chances are one is burgled every year. In 2017-18, as much as 52 percent of households had allocated part of their limited resources to the protection of their homes. In this paper, we study the evolution of crime and we explore the role that inequality, education and ethnolinguistic composition play in this context. We use administrative and census data (1996, 2001 and 2011), which we aggregate at the level of the country's former Magisterial Districts. This is the first time the dataset is used to study this topic. Omitted variables are our main concern. By means of using panel data, we are able to eliminate the bias created by time-fixed omitted variables. We further use spatial analysis to deal with the potentially omitted variables that explain the geographic concentration of crime. We find that higher inequality explains crime and that this impact is most important for property crimes, as proxied by thefts from cars. Moreover, within variation in the ethnolinguistic composition of districts is able to explain violent crimes, as proxied by aggravated assaults, but not property crimes. A high level of average education, which is associated with low inequality in terms of educational achievement, proves to be a useful tool in fighting against property crimes. Finally, we find evidence that crime spills into neighbouring districts and that this phenomenon is stronger in the case of property crimes.

The Brown Bag Lunch is a weekly series where professors and doctoral students present their ongoing research. For more details please contact Xiaojing Zhou.

BBL Spring 2019 - Overview