Three empirical essays in the economics of crime (Ph.D. Dissertation)

This dissertation presents empirical evidence on three previously overlooked aspects of the economics of crime. The first essays observes that pawnshops serve the credit needs of low-income individuals and consequently are located in higher crime communities. However, pawnshops are often suspected of being outlets for stolen property and if so, they may stimulate criminal activity. To break this simultaneity, this paper uses usury laws as instrumental variables to identify the causal effect of pawnshops on crime. Increases in the number of pawnshops are shown to raise the rate of those crimes in which pawnable property is stolen and to have no impact on the rates of those crimes in which such property is not taken. The results support the hypothesis that pawnshops trade in ill-gotten merchandise. The second essay employs variation in the public's access to registries of convicted sex offenders to test for empirical evidence of social penalties. The economic analysis of litigation pred