Identifying the socio-economic and demographic determinants of crime across Spanish provinces

This paper studies the socio-economic and demographic determinants of crime in Spain. We estimate a crime equation using a panel dataset of Spanish provinces from 1993 to 1999 and applying the GMM-system estimator. Results indicate that lagged crime rate, clearance rate, urbanisation rate and fraction of foreigners are positively correlated to crime rates. Property crimes are better explained by socio-economic variables (youth unemployment rate and education). Results are obtained using instrumental variables that use the dynamic properties of our dataset to control for both measurement errors in crime data and the likely joint endogeneity of the explanatory variables. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.