Understanding whether criminal behavior is “contagious” is important for law enforcement and
for policies that affect how people are sorted across social settings. We test the hypothesis that
criminal behavior is contagious by using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO)
randomized housing-mobility experiment to examine the extent to which lower local-area crime
rates decrease arrest rates among individuals. Our analysis exploits the fact that the effect of
treatment group assignment yields different types of neighborhood changes across the five MTO
demonstration sites. We use treatment-site interactions to instrument for measures of
neighborhood crime rates, poverty and racial segregation in our analysis of individual arrest
outcomes. We are unable to detect evidence in support of the contagion hypothesis.
Neighborhood racial segregation appears to be the most important explanation for acrossneighborhood
variation in arrests for violent crimes in our sample, perhaps because drug market
activity is more common in high-minority neighborhoods.
arrests
Keywords
Abstract
Year of Publication
2006
Number
510
Date Published
03/2006
Publication Language
eng
Citation Key
8104
Kling, J., & Ludwig, J. (2006). Is Crime Contagious?. Retrieved from http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp010p096690c (Original work published March 2006)
Working Papers