TY - JOUR AU - Linden,Leigh L. AU - Rockoff,Jonah E. TI - There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values From Megan's Laws JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12253 PY - 2006 Y2 - May 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12253 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12253.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Leigh Linden 1306 International Affairs Building 420 West 118th Street, Mail Code 3323 New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212-854-1674 Fax: 212-854-5765 E-Mail: ll2240@columbia.edu Jonah E. Rockoff Columbia University Graduate School of Business 3022 Broadway #603 New York, NY 10027-6903 Tel: 212/854-9799 Fax: 212/316-9219 E-Mail: jonah.rockoff@columbia.edu M1 - published as M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2006-05-29 AB - We combine data from the housing market with data from the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry to estimate how individuals value living in close proximity to a convicted criminal. We use the exact location of sex offenders to exploit variation in the threat of crime within small homogenous groupings of homes, and we use the timing of sex offenders' arrivals to control for baseline property values in the area. We find statistically and economically significant negative effects of sex offenders' locations that are extremely localized. Houses within a one-tenth mile area around the home of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average (about $5,500). We also find evidence that the effect varies with distance within this range -- houses next to an offender sell for about 12 percent less while those a tenth of a mile away or more show no decline. We combine our willingness-to-pay estimates with data on sexual crimes against neighbors to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses. We estimate costs of over $1 million per victim -- far in excess of estimates taken from the criminal justice literature. However, we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate the risk posed by offenders or view living near an offender as having costs exclusive of crime risk. ER -