Underreporting of Property Crimes: An Empirical Economic Analysis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18836/2178-0587/ealr.v5n2p271-284

Authors

  • Marcelo Justus Instituto de Economia/Unicamp
  • Luiz Guilherme Scorzafave FEA-RP/USP

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18836/2178-0587/ealr.v5n2p271-284

Abstract

Victimized individuals face the dilema of deciding whether or not to report the crime they suffered to law enforcement. The question is: does it pay to report crime? The answer can be indirectly observed in victimization surveys. The purpose of this paper is to model the decision-making process of victims of property crime, proxied by theft or robbery of persons. Individual data was used from 2003 and 2008 victimization surveys carried out in São Paulo city. We estimate a bivariate probit model with sample selection. We conclude that the probability of reporting an incident increases in the case of a violent crime and that it decreases with the frequency of repeated victimization. Moreover, the hypothesis of a positive, albeit not linear, relationship between wealth and reporting likelihood is also supported.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Marcelo Justus, Instituto de Economia/Unicamp

Doutor em Economia Aplicada pela Universidade de São Paulo. Atualmente é Professor Doutor no Instituto de Economia da UNICAMP, nas áreas de Estatística Econômica e Econometria. É pesquisador do Núcleo de Métodos Quantitativos Aplicados à Economia, onde desenvolve pesquisas empíricas nas áreas de Economia do Crime, Economia da Saúde e Trabalho Infantil.

Luiz Guilherme Scorzafave, FEA-RP/USP

possui graduação em Ciências Econômicas pela Universidade de São Paulo (1997), mestrado em Teoria Econômica pela USP (2001) e doutorado em Economia pela USP (2004). Atualmente é professor da Universidade de São Paulo, no câmpus de Ribeirão Preto. Atua principalmente nos seguintes temas: economia do crime, economia do trabalho, desigualdade de renda, pobreza, avaliação de políticas e economia da educação.

Downloads

Published

2015-03-29

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 2 (2014): Economic Analysis of Law Review

Section

Papers

License

The submission of a paper to Economic Analysis of Law Review implies the transfer, by the author(s), to the Catholic University of Brasília (UCB), of the aforementioned work for purposes of reproduction, dissemination, distribution, printing, publication and availability.

This journal offers immediate free access to its content, following the principle that making scientific knowledge freely available to the public provides greater global democratization of knowledge.

Authors who submit manuscripts for publication in EALR irrevocably agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright but grant Economic Analysis of Law Review the right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Commons Attribution-Share License, after publication, allowing the sharing of the work with acknowledgment of its authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors and EALR are authorized to sign additional contracts separately, for non-exclusive distribution of the version of the article published in this journal (e.g., publish in an institutional repository or as a book chapter), with recognition of authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are allowed and encouraged to publish and distribute their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their personal webpage) at any point before or during the editorial process, as this can generate productive changes as well as increase impact and citation of the published work (see The Effect of Open Access).