Does commerce promote theft? A quantitative study from Beijing, China

Bibliographic Data

ID22235316
AuthorsYutian Jiang (0000-0001-9839-4551, Beijing Jiaotong University, corresponding author), Na Zhang (0000-0001-8065-3412, Beijing Jiaotong University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume10
Issue1
Pages203-203
Publication date2023-05-05
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities and Social Sciences Communications (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2662-9992 • E-ISSN: 2662-9992
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/s41599-023-01706-x
PMID37192942
OpenAlexW4372340957
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited33

Commerce, as both an environmental and a social factor, is essential to the study of the causes of urban crimes. This paper aims to comprehensively propose research hypotheses based on these two types of commercial factors and optimise statistical tools with which to analyse commerce’s impact on the level of theft in Beijing. Combining criminal verdicts, census data, points of interest, and information on nighttime lighting, this paper first applies a hierarchical regression model to verify the effectiveness of using commercial environmental and social factors to explain theft statistics and then constructs a structural equation model to analyse the joint influence of multiple commercial factors on those statistics. This paper finds that Beijing’s commerce does not significantly promote theft, verifies the effectiveness of two types of commercial variables and the corresponding Western theories in explaining commerce’s impact on theft in Beijing, and provides empirical data for the study of the causes of theft in a non-Western context

Actuarial science · Beijing · Business · Census · China · Econometrics · Economics · Empirical research · Geography · Sociology · Statistics · Computer Science · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Impact of Light on Environment and Health · Mathematics

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Open DOIOpen Access