Halvor Mehlum, Edward Miguel, and Ragnar Torvik (2003), "Rainfall, Poverty, and Crime in Nineteenth-Century Germany" (Berkeley: U.C. Berkeley).
ABSTRACT: We estimate the impact of poverty on crime in nineteenth century Bavaria, Germany. Rainfall levels are used as instrumental variables for the price of rye to address identification problems found in the existing literature. The rye price was a major determinant of poverty during this period, as grain purchases constituted a large proportion of total households expenditures [up to 80%] for the poor. We find large, positive, and statistically significant effects of the rye price on property crime: a one standard deviation [40%] increase in the rye price increased property crime by 8 percent. This result is robust to another poverty measure (the real wage), and when we restrict attention to lagged rainfall measures as instruments.... We also find that higher rye prices lead to significantly less violent crime [0.5 coefficient], though, and argue that higher beer prices... are a likely explanation...
RELEVANT:
Posted by DeLong at December 1, 2003 05:02 PM | TrackBackThe law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.
Anatole France (1844–1924)
The Red Lily, ch. 7 (1894).
The link to the paper on Miguel's web page doesn't seem to be working...
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~emiguel/index.shtml
Posted by: Stefan on December 1, 2003 08:05 PMBy way of a pleasant coincidence, the NYT's Dining section over the weekend had a story (still available on the web) on Steven Kaplan, who has done some fascinating work on the role of bread in Revolutionary France, and some important work in saving the artisanal loaf in the Fifth Republic.
Posted by: Watchful Babbler on December 2, 2003 07:30 AM