Off-farm employment and rural crime: Evidence from village panel of rural China

This paper uses a unique village-level panel dataset on rural social public security to estimate the link between off-farm employment and rural crime in China. We find that, firstly, with one percent increase in off-farm employment, rural crimes and violating the security management and punishment regulations are projected to increase by 0.28 percent and 0.62 percent, respectively; secondly, there are no significant correlation between off-farm employment and rural civil disputes. Our results may have important public policy implications for the design of effective rural security policies.