The relationship between unemployment and crime is complex, consisting of two independent and counteracting effects: motivation and guardianship. The Cantor and Land model integrated these two effects leading to a new literature investigating the relationship between unemployment and crime. However, this literature always considers the impact of unemployment (or some other measure of the economy) on the volume or rate of crime. In this paper, we investigate the role unemployment plays in crime specialization on the Canadian provinces, 1981–2009. Using panel data and a hybrid modeling technique we find that unemployment impacts crime specialization, but this impact varies in magnitude and by crime type.
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