Less Cash, Less Crime: A National Replication

• In Event: Back to the Basics: Specific and General Deterrence

Abstract

Research has previously demonstrated that residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods experience high crime rates. Many of those residents depend on government assistance, which until 1997 was delivered via paper checks that had to be cashed making recipients vulnerable to crimes like robbery, assault, and burglary given that many of them were unbanked. With the enactment of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, the states replaced checks with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) payment cards removing substantial amounts of cash from these neighborhoods. Research in Missouri showed that moving from checks to EBT significantly lowered rates of predatory street crime (Wright et al., 2014). The current study tests these results on a national level using fixed effects difference-in-differences regression analysis. This replication explores the influence EBT has had on the Part I crimes of robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, and larceny-theft as Wright and colleagues previously demonstrated with the addition of the Part II crimes of fraud, forgery, and simple assault not included in the original study. Results have importance for violence prevention, crime trend predictions, and policy evaluation. Findings may also serve as an additional contribution to the deliberation surrounding the characteristics driving the crime drop since the 1990s.

Authors

• Donald Hunt, Georgia State University

• Volkan Topalli, Georgia State University

• Richard Wright, Georgia State University

• Dean Dabney, Georgia State University