Does urbanization cause crime? Evidence from rural–urban migration in South AfricaNelly Exbrayat, Victor Stéphane
Auteurs : Nelly Exbrayat, Victor Stéphane
Revue : Journal of Urban Economics, September 2025
Keywords : Crime; Migration; South Africa; Urbanization
Abstract : We study the impact of urbanization driven by internal migration on crime in South Africa. We create a new dataset that combines yearly data on crime and urban population density at the municipality level from 2011 to 2018. We exploit exogenous variations in rural–urban migration induced by climate shocks at origin for identification. We show that higher urban population density leads to a reduction in pecuniary crime rate but has no effect on non-pecuniary crime rate. This negative effect operates through changes in population composition and a social network effect.
Read the full article here
Retrouvez toutes les publications des enseignants·es-chercheurs·ses de Saint-Étienne School of Economics (SE²) sur le site du GATE Lyon / Saint-Étienne (Groupe d’Analyse et de Théorie Économique)
- Les champs de recherche
- Le lien formation recherche
- Publications
- Article Infinite-Pop
- Article Welfare theory
- Article A counterfactual
- Journal of Combinatorial Optimization
- International Journal of Game Theory
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Social Choice and Welfare
- Annals of Operations Research
- Autres publications
- Productive Workfare?
- Another brick in the wall.
- Approval voting without ballot restrictions
- Axiomatic foundations of the core for games in effectiveness form
- Sharing the global outcomes of finite natural resource exploitation: A dynamic coalitional stability perspective
- Lexicographic Solutions for Coalitional Rankings Based on Individual and Collective Performances.
- Objective rationality and recursive multiple priors
- Cooperative approach to a location problem with agglomeration economies
- A new approach to agglomeration problems
- Stable agreements through liability rules: a multi-choice game approach to the social cost problem
- Marginalism, egalitarianism, and efficiency in multi-choice games
- Priority relations and cooperation with multiple activity levels
- A Core Partition Ranking Solution to Coalitional Ranking Problems
- Axiomatic characterizations of the family of Weighted priority values
- FOPPA: an open database of French public procurement award notices from 2010-2020
- Evaluating the impact of public policies on large firms: a synthetic control approach to science-industry transfer policies
- Ranking rankings
- Sharing the cost of hazardous transportation networks and the Priority Shapley value for multi-choice games
- Structural holes in networks of cross-organizational R&D teams
- Cooperative Games with Externalities, Marginalism and the Average approach
- Flow methods for cooperative games with generalized coalition configuration
- An axiomatic characterization of the proportional threshold methods: A geometric approach
- Does urbanization cause crime? Evidence from rural–urban migration in South Africa
Saint-Etienne school of economics