Abstract:
My main objective in this paper is to evaluate how poverty was related to property crime and violent crime respectively in the Kingdom of Bavaria in the period 1835/36 – 60/61. My point of departure is the book Statistik der Gerichtlichen Polizei im Königreiche Bayern und in einigen anderen Ländern, written by the German statistician Georg Mayr (1841 – 1925) and published in 1867. Mayr was employed at the Bavarian Statistical Bureau when the book was published. He was appointed Director of the Bureau two years later. Mayr paid attention to the seven administrative regions Upper Bavaria, Lower Bavaria, Upper Palatinate, Lower Franconia, Middle Franconia, Upper Franconia and Swabia during the period 1835/36 – 60/61. I also limit my paper to the same seven administrative regions as Mayr did in his book. What makes the analysis by Mayr particularly valuable is that he divided crime into different categories and looked at how poverty, then measured in terms of the rye prices, affected different types of crime. His main empirical findings were that higher rye prices tended to lead to more property crime (where theft was the dominant subcategory), but less violent crime (mainly consisting of injuries and rape).
I further consider the article Poverty and crime in 19th century Germany written by Mehlum, Miguel and Torvik and published in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2006. The authors use much of the same data as Mayr did in his book, but they make a twist in the analysis, using rainfall as an instrumental variable for the rye prices. They also give a different explanation of why higher rye prices tended to give less violent crime in the Kingdom of Bavaria at that time, namely that higher rye prices yielded higher beer prices and thereby less alcohol consumption, which again gave less violence. Mayr on the other hand simply argued that the different types of crime had different motives; whereas simple theft was driven by distress, the violent crime was a result of crudity and passion. Although the beer prices may very well be important to correct for in the regression analysis, one cannot claim that higher rye prices led to higher beer prices for the period in question, due to the Reinheitsgebot, a food quality regulation from April 23rd 1516. This Bavarian Purity Law said that the only ingredients allowed to use in beer were barley, hop, and water.
After having found supplementary data, I calculate that the correlation coefficient for the barley and beer prices for the period 1835/36 – 60/61 is + 0.69 and thereby somewhat higher than the correlation coefficient for the rye and beer prices, which is + 0.64. That the former is larger than the latter is as expected, since beer was made with barley and not with rye. Interestingly, the correlation coefficient between the rye and barley prices is as high as + 0.95. So even if it was the barley prices that caused the higher beer prices and not the rye prices, at a first glance it still seems possible (since the rye prices and the barley prices were so highly correlated) that the reason why the rye prices and the violent crime were negatively related to each other was that beer was now more expensive, leading to lower alcohol consumption, and therefore people were less violent. I then exchange the rye prices with the beer prices in the data set which Mehlum et al use and I find that the variable for the beer prices is statistically significant in the regression for violent crime, even at the 1 % level. A 1 % change in the beer prices is associated with a - 0.9 % change in violent crime, so this effect is significant in every meaning of the word (...).