Is There a Crime Drop in Western Europe?

Combining data from police statistics and crime victim surveys, this article analyses the evolution of crime in Western Europe from 1988 to 2007. The results show that there is no general drop in crime. Property offences and homicide have been decreasing since the mid 1990s, while violent and drug offences have increased during the period under study. These trends highlight the limits of the explanations to the crime drop in the United States, which are based on the premise of a correlation in the evolution of all offences. The drop in property offences seems related to changes in the socioeconomic situation in Europe as well as to increases in security measures in households, and the reinforcement of private security. The increase in violent offences can be explained by the combination of several factors, including changes in youth's free time provoked by the development of the Internet, changing demographics, and the rise of episodic heavy alcohol consumption and street gangs.

A Typology of Identity-Related Crime

Identification is ever more important in the online world, and identity-related crime is a growing problem related to this. This new category of crime is not restricted to high-profile instances of identity 'theft' or identity fraud; it is wide-ranging and complex, ranging from identity deletion to unlawful identity creation and identity 'theft'. Commonly accepted definitions are lacking, thus blurring available statistics, and policies to combat this new crime are piecemeal at best. To assess the real nature and magnitude of identity-related crime, and to be able to discuss how it can be combated, identity-related crime should be understood in all its aspects. As a first key step, this article introduces a typology of identity-related crime, consisting of conceptual, technical and legal categories, that can be used as a comprehensive framework for future research, countermeasures and policies related to identity related crime.

Registro, centralización y análisis de eventos en un entorno corporativo multiplataforma

Trabajo final de carrera sobre el uso del software libre para la construcción de un sistema para el registro, centralización y análisis de eventos en un entorno corporativo multiplataforma.

Is There a Crime Drop in Western Europe?

Combining data from police statistics and crime victim surveys, this article analyses the evolution of crime in Western Europe from 1988 to 2007. The results show that there is no general drop in crime. Property offences and homicide have been decreasing since the mid 1990s, while violent and drug offences have increased during the period under study. These trends highlight the limits of the explanations to the crime drop in the United States, which are based on the premise of a correlation in the evolution of all offences. The drop in property offences seems related to changes in the socioeconomic situation in Europe as well as to increases in security measures in households, and the reinforcement of private security. The increase in violent offences can be explained by the combination of several factors, including changes in youth's free time provoked by the development of the Internet, changing demographics, and the rise of episodic heavy alcohol consumption and street gangs.

The role of moral values in the economic analysis of crime: A general equilibrium approach

In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium model of crime and show thatlaw enforcement has different roles depending on the equilibrium characterization and the value of social norms. When an economy has a unique stable equilibrium where a fraction of the population is productive and the remaining predates, the government can choose an optimal law enforcement policy to maximize a welfare function evaluated at the steady state. If such steady state is not unique, law enforcement is still relevant but in a completely different way because the steady state that prevails depends on the initial proportions of productive and predator individuals in the economy. The relative importance of these proportions can be changed through law enforcement policy.

Crime and punishment: Further results

I consider a general specification of criminals' objective functionand argue that, when the general non-expected utility theory issubstituted for the traditional expected utility theory, thehigh-fine-low-probability result (Becker, 1968) only holds underspecific and strong restrictions.