Why do Europeans steal more than Americans?

Property crime is today more widespread in Europe than in the United States, while the opposite was true during the 1970s and 1980s. In this paper we study the determinants of crime in a dynamic general equilibrium model with uninsured idiosyncratic shocks. We focus on Germany, and compute the contribution of various factors to the total change. We find that the most important factor explaining the reversal are changes in the probability of apprehension and prison duration for the United States, and demographic changes for Germany. Changes in labor tax rates and transfers are unimportant for the United States. For Germany they have non-negligible effects, but they go in opposite directions and tend to offset each other.