Spatial dependence of the relationship between unemployment and crimes against property: An application on Turkey

Many macroeconomic variables such as unemployment, wage, inflation, gross domestic product per capita and inequity in income distribution have impact on crimes against property which is comitted for mostly economic reasons. In this study, it is aimed to determine spatial dependence of relationship between unemployment and crimes of against property that is based on NUTS2 regions of Turkey, through the spatial panel analysis. The study consists of three parts. In the first part, titles related to criminology are included. In the second part, economic models for the crime which were created by Becker in 1968 and developed by Ehrlich (1973), Heineke (1978) and Schmidt and Witte (1984) are analyzed. In addition to the second part, studies investigating of relationship between crime and unemployment have been examined. Finally in the third part, in order to determine spatial dependence of relationship between unemployment and crimes of against property that is based on NUTS2 regions of Turkey, spatial panel analysis is applied using data from 2008-2014. In the analysis, while Hausman test result indicate that fixed effect spatial panel model is the most suitable model for the study, likelihood ratio test results also indicates that the spatial autoregressive model is the most suitable model for the study. Empirical evidence indicates that there is positive direction spatial dependence between contiguity neighbour regions and contiguity neighbour increases the crimes against property, in addition that the effect of unemployment on crimes against property is in the positive direction.