This year at the American Society of Criminology I will be presenting some work from my dissertation, Quantifying the Local and Spatial Effects of Alcohol Outlets on Crime. I have the working paper posted on SSRN, and that also has a link to download data and code to reproduce the findings in the paper.

I will be presenting at the panel Alcohol and Crime on Wednesday at 9:30 (at the Cambridge room on the 2nd level).

Here is the abstract:

This paper estimates the relationship between alcohol outlets and crime at micro place street units in Washington, D.C. Three specific additions to this voluminous literature are articulated. First, the diffusion effect of alcohol outlets is larger than the local effect. This has important implications for crime prevention. The second is that in this sample the effects of on-premise and off-premise outlets are very similar in magnitude. I argue this is evidence in favor of routine activities theory, in opposition to theories which emphasize individual alcohol consumption. The final is that alcohol outlets have large effects on burglary, despite the fact that alcohol outlets cannot increase the number of vulnerable targets, as it can with interpersonal crimes. I discuss how this can either be interpreted as evidence that alcohol outlets self-select into already crime prone areas, or potentially that the presence of motivated offenders’ matters much more than increasing the number of potential victims.

The most interesting finding is the fact that I estimate the diffusion effect of alcohol outlets is larger than the local effect. I then show that this is the case for some other papers as well, it is just interpreting the regression model is tricky. Here is a diagram showing what happens. The idea is the regression coefficient for the spatial lag is one orange dot, and the local effect is the blue dot. Adding a bar though diffuses to multiple places, so when adding up all the smaller orange dots, they result in more crime than the one bigger blue dot.