Inequality and Violent Crime

Abstract

In this article we take an empirical cross-country perspective to investigate the robustness and causality of thelink between income inequality and crime rates. First, we study the correlation between the Gini index and,respectively, homicide and robbery rates along different dimensions of the data (within and betweencountries). Second, we examine the inequality-crime link when other potential crime determinants arecontrolled for. Third, we control for the likely joint endogeneity of income ...