The Effect of Social Connectedness on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration

Bryan A Stuart; Evan J. Taylor

doi:10.1162/rest_a_00860

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The Effect of Social Connectedness on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration

Bryan A Stuart¹; Evan J. Taylor²

¹ George Washington University and IZA · ² University of Arizona

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2021 open access

This paper estimates the effect of social connectedness on crime across U.S. cities from 1970 to 2009. Migration networks among African Americans from the South generated variation across destinations in the concentration of migrants from the same birth town. Using this novel source of variation, we find that social connectedness considerably reduces murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts, with a one standard deviation increase in social connectedness reducing murders by 21 percent and motor vehicle thefts by 20 percent. Social connectedness especially reduces murders of adolescents and young adults committed during gang and drug activity.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00860
Volume: 103 (1)
Pages: 18-33
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: openalex crossref