Local Crime Environment and Corporate Financial Misconduct Using Benford’s Law

This study analyzes the impact of the local crime environment on the likelihood of a firm engaging in financial misconduct. Using the Benford Score metric, which assesses the extent to which a firm’s financial statement number distribution diverges from a theoretical distribution, I find that firms headquartered in high crime areas are associated with greater financial misconduct. The link is more pronounced in firms that offer more stock-based executive compensation to their executives or practice weak corporate governance, and change in the crime rate is associated with change in the firm’s financial misconduct. My results support the social norm, social learning, and environmental criminology theories, as well as the fraud triangle, and are robust to a number of alternative specifications and approaches. The evidence implies that a firm’s environment influences the level of corporate financial misconduct.

Illegal fishing and compliance management in marine protected areas: a situational approach

Protected Areas (PAs) are spatially representative management tools that impose various levels of protection for conservation purposes. As spatially regulated places, ensuring compliance with the rules represents a key element of effective management and positive conservation outcomes. Wildlife crime, and in particular poaching, is a serious global problem that undermines the success of PAs. This study applies a socio-ecological approach to understanding the opportunity structure of illegal recreational fishing (poaching) in no-take zones in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. We use Boosted Regression Trees to predict the spatio-temporal distribution of poaching risk within no-take Marine National Park zones. The results show that five risk factors account for nearly three quarters (73.6%) of the relative importance for poaching in no-take zones and that temporally varying conditions influence risk across space. We discuss these findings through the theoretical lens of Environmental Criminology and suggest that law enforcement strategies focus on reducing the negative outcomes associated with poaching by limiting the opportunity of would-be offenders to undertake illegal activity.

Risky Business: Examining the 80-20 Rule in Relation to a RTM Framework

The spatial elements of crime occurrence and the identification of crime generators/attractors have remained a prominent area of research. We focus on the utility of the 80-20 rule and the labeling of risky facilities in crime forecasting models with risk terrain modeling (RTM). We first examine whether the rule holds across types of crime generating places including liquor stores, department stores, hotels/motels, restaurants/bars, and apartment complexes. Next, we use our findings to test whether conducting preliminary analyses to identify risky facilities increases the predictive power of RTM versus using all possible facilities. When restricting the RTM approach to only risky facilities, results were more accurate than a traditional RTM approach. Findings and implications are nested in the utilization of the wider body of environmental criminology research to increase our understanding of where crime is likely to occur.

The Influence of Street Network Features on Robberies Around Public Housing Communities

Previous research has consistently identified a crime spillover effect from public housing communities. However, variation in spillover between communities has also been observed. Drawing upon environmental criminology and recent advancements in crime and place research, we examine whether street block betweenness conditions the relationship between street block distance to public housing communities and robbery levels. Negative binomial regression results indicate that street block distance is inversely related to robberies and betweenness is positively associated with robbery levels. The interaction between distance to the nearest public housing community and betweenness suggests robberies decrease more slowly farther from public housing communities on street blocks with higher betweenness. Findings demonstrate the importance of considering the context in which potentially criminogenic facilities are situated.