A partner in crime : assortative matching and bias in the crime market
Working paper
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http://hdl.handle.net/11250/217635Utgivelsesdato
2014-06Metadata
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Sammendrag
I identify a discriminatory bias in partnership formation within the property crime mar-
ket in the United States. Theoretically, the prisoner's dilemma creates an incentive for a
criminal to form a partnership with a counterpart with the same probability of success, re-
sulting in an equilibrium pattern of positive assortative matching. Using individual matched
report-arrest data from the National Incident Based Reporting System and a novel empiri-
cal strategy, I pinpoint matches where the underlying probability of success of two partners
differ. This difference in probability is correlated with observable characteristics, which
could be evidence for discrimination and search frictions. I find patterns consistent with
discrimination in male-female partnerships and patterns consistent with search frictions in
black-white matches. In particular, females in a male-female partnership are more likely to
evade law-enforcement than males, even though on average males are more successful as a
group. This results is robust to controlling for the criminal earnings, individual criminal
offenses and market characteristics. Furthermore, these patterns are found also in criminal
groups of a size bigger than 2. The result could be either due to pre-crime marital matching
or discrimination.