Socioeconomic conditions and property crime: A comprehensive review and test of the professional literature

A comprehensive review of the crime literature indicates varying and often opposing hypotheses of relationships between property crime and socioeconomic conditions such as poverty, business cycle conditions, demographics, criminal justice system actions, and family structure. Employing measures of each of the hypothesized factors, time-series models for robbery, burglary; and vehicle theft are estimated from yearly and national Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data for the period 1959 through 1992 and are used to test these hypotheses' current empirical relevance. The empirical findings selectively confirm the importance of macroeconomic stability and criminal justice system actions in reducing property crime activity. In contrast, decreases in absolute poverty and general income inequality are associated with increased criminal activity; and age demographics and family/community structure apparently have little impact on any of the analyzed property-crime trends. A reduction in inflation apparently decreases property crimes.