| 江鸿泽,梁平汉.数字金融发展与犯罪治理[J].数量经济技术经济研究,2022,(10):68-88 | | 数字金融发展与犯罪治理 | | The Development of Digital Finance and Crime Reduction | | | | DOI： | | 中文关键词: 数字金融 盗窃 犯罪治理 裁判文书 文本识别 | | 英文关键词: Digital Finance Thefts Crime Reduction Judicial Documents Text Recognition | | 基金项目:本文获得国家社会科学基金重大项目（21ZDA084）、国家自然科学基金项目（71773075，71803176，71922015，72074150，72103125）、中国博士后基金面上资助项目（2020M671062）、上海市哲学社会科学规划课题（2019BJB001）及上海市“超级博士后”项目的资助 | | | 中文摘要: | | 数字经济和数字金融的快速发展改变了社会生活的各个方面，对社会治理也产生了影响。本文从犯罪的成本—收益角度研究数字金融发展对盗窃犯罪的影响。利用中国裁判文书网上公布的2014～2019年全部盗窃罪一审刑事判决书，通过文本大数据识别，构建了地级市层面盗窃犯罪率面板数据，研究发现数字金融水平每增加一个标准差，则当地盗窃犯罪率显著下降0.579个标准差，基于CLDS微观调查数据的稳健性检验和基于城市与杭州的球面距离的工具变量分析支持这一结果，并且数字金融发展主要减少了年龄较小、受教育程度较高的个人进行盗窃犯罪。而且，我们没有发现数字金融发展导致其他犯罪类型数量增加。机制分析显示，数字金融发展通过提升支付便利性降低了盗窃行为的预期收益，并通过促进市场就业提高了盗窃犯罪的机会成本。基于CLDS微观数据研究表明，居民被盗后信任度、幸福感、安全感水平显著下降，情绪问题加重，医疗开支增加。本文还量化了盗窃犯罪对于受害者家庭支出的影响，显示了数字金融所能产生的意料之外的社会收益。因此，在互联网时代，需要不断加强和创新适应新技术和新业态发展的社会治理手段和工具，实现包容性增长，从而建设平安中国，推动高质量发展。 | | 英文摘要: | | Summary: The fast development of digital finance in China is leading to changes in various aspects of social life, including social governance. This paper studies the development of digital finance on theft activities in China from the perspective of criminals cost-benefit analysis. We employed a rational criminal model following Becker (1968) to identify the channels through which the development of digital finance may affect the criminal decision. We showed that the development of digital finance may reduce the expected return from thefts, relax the liquidity constraint of potential criminals, and raise the opportunity cost of potential criminals by improving the labor market.Utilizing text recognition techniques, we extracted information on criminals from all judicial documents of thefts during 2014-2019 (over one million), and constructed a prefecture-city level panel dataset of theft activities. We normalized the number of theft criminals by the number of residents in a city to measure the theft rates. To measure the development of digital finance, we applied the widely-used digital finance development index, developed by a research team of the Peking University. The baseline results demonstrate that the development of digital finance significantly reduced theft activities. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the digital finance development index was associated with a 0.579 standard deviation decrease in theft rates. Various robustness checks supported our results. We also conducted a national representative household survey covering self-reported experiences of being stolen, showing that the development of digital finance significantly reduced the likelihood of being stolen. To alleviate the endogeneity problem, we used the geographic distance from each city to Hangzhou, the headquarter of Alipay, the major provider of digital finance in China, as Instrumental Variable (IV) to assess the development of digital finance. The IV estimation also supported the main results. Moreover, neither the analysis of the judicial documents nor the household survey indicated that the development of digital finance is correlated with an increase in other major crime types, including fraud, robbery, assault, and extortion.Furthermore, we used the sub-indices of the digital finance index as the explanatory variables, and found that the mitigating effect mainly comes from payment facilitation. The results of the heterogeneity analysis show that the development of digital finance allowed to reduce the number of the most serious theft cases, as well as of those crimes involving younger criminals or criminals with a high educational attainment. The results of the mechanism analysis show that, although the development of digital finance was accompanied by a substantial reduction in the number of thefts involving cash and cell phones, the number of thefts involving electrical bikes, which is another popular target of thefts, did not change. Moreover, the benefits of digital finance on theft reduction were found to be concentrated in areas with higher income and lower unemployment. However, the level of financial development was not found to affect the role of digital finance in theft reduction. These results indicate that digital finance works through reducing the expected return from thefts and raising the opportunity cost of crime, and not by relaxing the liquidity constraint.We also used household survey data to estimate the social cost of thefts. It was found that the victims of thefts experienced a significant deterioration of trust, happiness, and perception of safety, as well as heightened emotional distress. Furthermore, their medical expenses also substantially increased. Consistent with the finding that the victims suffer a considerably higher impact on mental health than physical loss, it was estimated that being stolen significantly increases the annual medical expenses by 29.54%. Combining this finding with the previous estimate on the impact of digital finance on theft activities using household survey data, we found that a one standard deviation increase in digital finance development could reduce the annual medical expenses of an average household by as much as 102.413-126.630 CNY. Our results suggest the unexpected social benefits of digital finance development. | | 查看全文 相关附件： 下载数据代码附录.zip |
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