Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In this paper, I estimate the causal effect of property crime on real personal income per capita. Running system GMM on an unbalanced panel of U.S. MSA-year pairs suggests that property crime reduces real personal income per capita by 13.3%. This implies that the average person loses $4,869 (2009 dollars) per year with real annual personal income per capita totaling $36,615. The effect is driven primarily by larceny-theft and burglary with coefficients of -0.179 and -0.110 respectively. Estimates for the effect of robbery are unstable, and the effect of motor vehicle theft if significant, but smaller with a coefficient of -0.060.