In this paper, we test the hypothesis that access to electronic payments may reduce crime. Our results suggest that there is a negative and significant statistical relationship between access to electronic payments and the incidence of economic crimes such as robbery and burglary, while...

It is widely believed that the growing use of electronic financial transactions should reduce physical vulnerability to crimes such as robbery and burglary. Using a sample of 49 countries over six years, we test this hypothesis using fixed effects (FE) and difference GMM estimators. Our results...