Room 1037, 690 Building

Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: In this paper we study the effect of local social capital on local crime rates taking advantage of the quasi-random nature of the implementation of a community health policy that took place in the city of Barcelona from 2008 to 2014. Salut als Barris (SAB) is a policy that through community-based initiatives and empowerment of citizenship aims at improving health outcomes and reducing inequalities of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Based on economic and sociological literature it is also arguable that it may affect other relevant variables for overall welfare, such as crime rates. In order to test such hypothesis, we use month-neighborhood-level data for Barcelona and a Staggered Differences-in-Differences approach. Overall we find that SAB highly reduces home and non-cognitive crimes, with responses ranging from 9% to 20%. Additionally, female victimization rates drop for all age groups as well as the offense rates of younger cohorts. We argue that such outcomes are due to larger local social capital. This provides evidence in favor of non-traditional crime preventing policies.