What factors drive the length of a kidnapping experience? A theoretical model is developed to conduct comparative statics. A unique data set covering all kidnappings for ransom in Sardinia between 1960 and 2010 is analyzed. Factors related to the ability to pay and cost of abduction matter. The...

Empirical evidence of the marginal deterrent effect is provided. Exploring a data set of kidnapping crimes in Sardinia between 1960 and 2012 changes in Italian policy regarding sanctions for kidnapping and their associated impact on murders is considered. Deaths associated with kidnappings...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, for the case of Italy, ceteris paribus, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist ones in the short and long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (Crime and Punishment - An Economic...

In the last decades, the interest in the relationship between crime and business cycle has widely increased. It is a diffused opinion that a causal relationship goes from economic variables to criminal activities. This work aims to verify this proposition by using the dynamic factor model to...

This paper employs provincial data to study the relationship between several crime typologies, namely murder, theft, robbery and fraud, and economic output in Italy. We employ a spatial econometric approach where the spatial proximity is defined by a measure of physical distance between...

This paper analyses how a set of economic variables and a deterrence variable affect criminal activity. Furthermore, it highlights the extent to which crime is detrimental for the economic activity. The case study is Italy for the time span 1970 up to 2004. An Autoregressive Distributed Lags...

Criminal activity performs like a tax on the entire economy - it discourages domestic and foreign direct investments, it reduces firms’ competitiveness, and reallocates resources creating uncertainty and inefficiency. Although the impact of economic variables on crime has been widely...

In the last decades, the interest in the relationship between crime and business cy- cle has widely increased. It is a diffused opinion that a causal relationship goes from economic variables to criminal activities, but this causal effect is observed only for some typology of crimes, such as...

This paper analyses the linkage between tourism and crime with particular focus on the distortions generated onto criminal activities by the presence of visitors. Controlling for socio-demographic and economic variables, we empirically investigate the contribution of tourist arrivals to...