Crime and Output: Theory and Application to the Northern Triangle of Central America

Download or read book Crime and Output: Theory and Application to the Northern Triangle of Central America written by Dmitry Plotnikov and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper presents a structural model of crime and output. Individuals make an occupational choice between criminal and legal activities. The return to becoming a criminal is endogenously determined in a general equilibrium together with the level of crime and economic activity. I calibrate the model to the Northern Triangle countries and conduct several policy experiments. I find that for a country like Honduras crime reduces GDP by about 3 percent through its negative effect on employment indirectly, in addition to direct costs of crime associated with material losses, which are in line with literature estimates. Also, the model generates a non-linear effect of crime on output and vice versa. On average I find that a one percent increase in output per capita implies about 1⁄2 percent decline in crime, while a decrease of about 5 percent in crime leads to about one percent increase in output per capita. These positive effects are larger if the initial level of crime is larger.