Pridemore, W.A., Roche, S.P., & Rogers, M.L. (2018). Cashlessness and Street Crime: A Cross-National STudy of Direct Deposit Payment and Robbery Rates. Justice Quarterly.

ABSTRACT

Substantial variation in national crime rates suggests social structure and cultural context influence offending and victimization. Several prominent criminological theories anticipate a positive association between the prevalence of cash in a society and its rates of pecuniary crime. We examined the association between one form of “cashlessness” and national robbery rates across nations (n = 67), controlling for several structural covariates of national crime rates. We obtained data on robbery rates from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and data on government-based cashlessness from Global Financial Inclusion Database. We find that nations with higher levels of government-based cashlessness had lower robbery rates (β = -0.41, p = .02). We also undertook several sensitivity analyses, including tests for the effect of private-based cashlessness and for outcome variables (e.g., homicide) for which we expected no effect. Our results reveal technological advancements can have implications for a nation’s street crime rates.

KEYWORDS

Cash; electronic financial transactions; economy; robbery; cross-national crime rates