More sports, more crimes? An analysis for the Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre

Abstract

Does the occurrence of crimes increase or decrease on sporting event days? There is no conclusive answer in the literature. This article uses a database that combines crime occurrences in the Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre and the performance of soccer matches in a panel of daily data for the period 2014-2018. Considering matches as an exogenous variable, we estimated an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL). We found that the hypothesis of reduction of crime due to the greater security adopted in 2014 - the year in which Brazil hosted the World Cup - is supported. Also, we found a 4-day delayed small, but positive effect of matches on crime.