Weather, Pollution, and Crime - Dennis Wesselbaum

In this paper we study the relationship between (i) weather and crime and (ii) air pollution and crime. We construct a city-level, hourly data set with 2.4 million crimes and link each crime to data on weather conditions and pollutants. Our identification strategy relies on using high dimensional fixed effects and exploiting hourly variations. For the weather-crime relation, our results show that using daily observations overestimates the effect of temperature and underestimates the effect of precipitation on crime and leads to different conclusions about the significance of variables. We then study the effects of four pollutants (nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone) on crime, as these have different neurotoxic effects. We find that carbon monoxide has a positive effect on violent crimes and ozone has a negative In this paper we study the relationship between (i) weather and crime and (ii) air pollution and crime. We construct a city-level, hourly data set with 2.4 million crimes and link each crime to data on weather conditions and pollutants. Our identification strategy relies on using high dimensional fixed effects and exploiting hourly variations. For the weather-crime relation, our results show that using daily observations overestimates the effect of temperature and underestimates the effect of precipitation on crime and leads to different conclusions about the significance of variables. We then study the effects of four pollutants (nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone) on crime, as these have different neurotoxic effects. We find that carbon monoxide has a positive effect on violent crimes and ozone has a negative effect on property crimes.