Identifying the Relationship Between Crime and Unemployment in United States for the Period 1985-2022

This research paper explored the connection between unemployment and property crime in United States utilizing annual time series data ranging from 1985 to 2022.The other explanatory variables such as poverty rate, real minimum wage was used along with unemployment to analyze their impact on property crime rates. The study adapted the autoregressive distributed lag cointegration (ARDL) method to test the hypothesis of long-term relationship between unemployment and property crime. The results obtained from this study were also supported by the economic theory of crime which revealed that an increase in unemployment rate will increase the rate of property crime. The ARDL method used revealed that there exists a long run relationship between property crime and unemployment. The study also employed different unit root test approaches such as ADF (Augmented Dickey-Fuller), PP (Phillips-Perron) and KPSS (Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin) to check for robustness in the results. The results obtained from the unit roots test showed that the variables are stationary at different order of integration I (0) and I (1). The model of this study was also free from autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity problems. The error correction model (ECM) demonstrated the speed of adjustment of the model when it is disequilibrium in the short run to the long run equilibrium. The ECM result showed that there is a speed of adjustment of about 60%.