Publications in Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals
Braakmann, N., Chevalier, A., & Wilson, T. (2024). Expected returns to crime and crime location. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 16(4), 144-160.
We provide first evidence that temporal variations in the expected returns to crime affect the location of property crime. Our identification strategy relies on the widely-held perception in the UK that households of South Asian descent store gold jewellery at home. Price movements on the international market for gold exogenously affect the expected gains from burgling these households, which become relatively more lucrative targets as the gold price increases. Using a neighbourhood-level panel on reported crime and difference-in-differences, we find that burglaries in South Asian neighbourhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighbourhoods in the same municipality, confirming that burglars react rationally to variations in the expected returns to their activities. We conduct a battery of robustness tests to eliminate alternative explanations.
Anderberg, D., Rainer, H., Wadsworth, J. and Wilson, T., (2016). Unemployment and Domestic Violence: Theory and Evidence. The Economic Journal, 126(597), pp.1947-1979.
Does rising unemployment really increase domestic violence as many commentators expect? The contribution of this article is to examine how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse. Theory predicts that male and female unemployment have opposite‐signed effects on domestic abuse: an increase in male unemployment decreases the incidence of intimate partner violence, while an increase in female unemployment increases domestic abuse. Combining data on intimate partner violence from the British Crime Survey with locally disaggregated labour market data from the UK’s Annual Population Survey, we find strong evidence in support of the theoretical prediction.
Sauer, R.M. and Wilson, T., (2016). The Rise of Female Entrepreneurs: New Evidence on Gender Differences in Liquidity constraints. European Economic Review, 86, pp.73-86.
In this paper, we study the importance of liquidity constraints for entrepreneurial activity, using previously unexplored data from the UK. Using inheritances as an instrument, IV estimates reveal that single women drive the overall relationship between personal wealth and the propensity to start a new business. Defining business ownership rather than self-employment as the entrepreneurial outcome measure is also shown to be critical. Using self-employment leads to selection bias and underestimates the impact of personal wealth. The results imply that efforts aimed at relieving the liquidity constraints of single women could help further accelerate the recent rise of female entrepreneurship.
Tanya Wilson 