Is Crime Contagious?
利用“搬向机会”随机住房实验数据，检验低犯罪率社区能否降低个人被捕率，未发现犯罪传染的证据，但种族隔离是暴力犯罪被捕率差异的重要解释。
Understanding whether criminal behavior is “contagious” is important for law enforcement and for policies that affect how people are sorted across social settings. We test the hypothesis that criminal behavior is contagious by using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing mobility experiment to examine the extent to which lower local area crime rates decrease arrest rates among individuals. Our analysis exploits the fact that the effect of treatment group assignment yields different types of neighborhood changes across the five MTO demonstration sites. We use treatment by site interactions as instruments for measures of neighborhood crime rates, poverty, and racial segregation in our analysis of individual arrest outcomes. We are unable to detect evidence in support of the contagion hypothesis. Neighborhood racial segregation appears to be the most important explanation for across‐neighborhood variation in arrests for violent crimes in our sample, perhaps because drug market activity is more common in high‐minority neighborhoods.