Likelihood Based Inference and Prediction in Spatio-Temporal Panel Count Models for Urban Crimes

49 Pages Posted: 11 Jun 2015 Last revised: 16 Jun 2015

See all articles by Roman Liesenfeld

Roman Liesenfeld

University of Cologne, Department of Economics

Jean-Francois Richard

University of Pittsburgh - Department of Economics

Jan Vogler

Ruhr University of Bochum - Faculty of Management and Economics

Date Written: June 15, 2015

Abstract

We develop a panel data count model combined with a latent Gaussian spatio-temporal heterogenous state process to analyze monthly severe crimes at the census tract level in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our data set combines Uniform Crime Reporting data with socio-economic data from the 2000 census. The likelihood of the model is accurately estimated by adapting recently developed efficient importance sampling techniques applicable to high-dimensional spatial models with sparse precision matrices. Our estimation results confirm socio-economic explanations for crime and, foremost, the broken-windows hypothesis, whereby less severe crimes in a region is a leading indicator for severe crimes. In addition to ML parameter estimates, we compute several other statistics of interest for law enforcement such as elasticities (idiosyncratic, total, short-term as well as long-term) of severe crimes w.r.t. less severe crimes, one-month-ahead out-of-sample forecasts, predictive cumulative distribution functions and validation test statistics based on these cdf's.

Keywords: Broken-windows hypothesis, Efficient Importance sampling, Empirical crime model, Out-of-sample crime forecasts, Spatio-temporal econometrics

JEL Classification: C15; C23; C25; C51; C53; K42; R15

Suggested Citation

Liesenfeld, Roman and Richard, Jean-Francois and Vogler, Jan, Likelihood Based Inference and Prediction in Spatio-Temporal Panel Count Models for Urban Crimes (June 15, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2616602 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2616602

Roman Liesenfeld (Contact Author)

University of Cologne, Department of Economics ( email )

Albertus-Magnus-Platz
D-50931 Köln
Germany

Jean-Francois Richard

University of Pittsburgh - Department of Economics ( email )

4901 Wesley Posvar Hall
230 South Bouquet Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
United States
412-648-1750 (Phone)

Jan Vogler

Ruhr University of Bochum - Faculty of Management and Economics ( email )

Bochum, 44801
Germany

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