Document Type
Working Paper
Date of this Version
10-2-2020
Funding
This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation [1333623, Calnitsky] and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant [430-2017-00889, Calnitsky]. Thanks are also due to Evelyn Forget, Christine Schwartz, Erik Olin Wright, Robert Freeland, Jeffrey Malecki, Jonathan Latner, Matias Cociña, and Tim Smeeding for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to Stewart Deyell, Sabrina Kinsella, and the production team at Statistics Canada for assistance in data construction.
Abstract
Would unconditional cash payments reduce crime and violence? This paper examines data on crime and violence in the context of an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome. We combine town-level crime statistics for all medium-sized Canadian Prairie towns with town-level socio-demographic data from the census to study how an experimental guaranteed income impacted both violent crime and total crime. We find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and both outcomes. We also decompose total crime and analyze its main components, property crime and “other” crime, and find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and property crime. While the impact on property crime is theoretically straightforward, we close by speculating on the mechanisms that might link the availability of guaranteed annual income payments with a decline in violence, focusing in on the mechanisms that impact patterns of domestic violence.
Keywords
guaranteed annual income, basic Income, crime, violence
Recommended Citation
Calnitsky, David, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons. 2020. "The Impact of an Experimental Guaranteed Income on Crime and Violence." University of Pennsylvania Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC), 2020-56. https://repository.upenn.edu/psc_publications/56.
Included in
Criminology Commons, Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons
Date Posted: 02 October 2020
Comments
This is a pre-print of an article published in the following journal:
Calnitsky, David and Pilar Gonalons-Pons. 2020. "The Impact of an Experimental Guaranteed Income on Crime and Violence." Social Problems:spaa001. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa001.