Unemployment, poverty and police performance: an ARDL analysis of crime in Sao Paulo

The main objective of this study is to determine which factors are related to the reduction of crime rates in the city of Sao Paulo in the last decades. This article presents and tests hypotheses of how Sao Paulo's decline in crime rate is linked to economic and social conditions and improved police performance. For empirical purposes, we focus on a single unitary space - the city of Sao Paulo - to avoid the risk of spatial dependence already identified in many crime studies. We use an autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration structure. The results presented in our article point to a different solution to fight crime, public policies that encourage the labor market are more difficult in the long term.