Cell Phones & Crime Rates
2019-06-02 17:54:28.587375+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
The Collapsing Crime Rates of the ’90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones
Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.
Kind of interesting to think about this in terms of the decline of value of retail: the geographic turf becomes less valuable for drug dealing, so protecting it is less important.
See also: Restaurants and food trucks.