Data and Code for: Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location

This is the replication package for the article "Expected Returns to Crime and Crime Location". We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the
location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception
in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price
movements on the international market for gold exogenously affect the expected gains from
burgling these households, which become relatively more lucrative targets as the gold price
increases. Using a neighbourhood-level panel on reported crime and difference-in-differences,
we find that burglaries in South Asian neighbourhoods are more sensitive to variations in
the gold price than other neighbourhoods in the same municipality, confirming that burglars
react rationally to variations in the expected returns to their activities. We conduct a battery
of robustness tests to eliminate alternative explanations.