Abstract
The fear of becoming a victim of crime acts like barriers to retail trade for consumers; retailers attempt to reduce such barriers by enduring additional costs such as insurance or security/surveillance costs. Accordingly, equilibrium retail prices are affected by the possibility of crime. This paper attempts to measure the effects of anti-crime laws on such equilibrium retail prices. As an application, a difference-in-difference approach is employed to identify the effects of an anti-panhandling ordinance issued by the County of Sacramento on gasoline prices at the retail level, by considering the gas stations in neighbor counties as the control group of a natural experiment. The results show that the anti-panhandling ordinance has resulted in lower gasoline prices in the County of Sacramento.
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