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The British Journal of Criminology 41:127-149 (2001)
© 2001 Centre for Crime & Justice Studies (formerly ISTD)

Revisiting the Dark Figure

A Microeconometric Analysis of the Under-reporting of Property Crime and Its Implications

Ziggy MacDonald*

Public Sector Economics Research Centre, Department of Economics, University of Leicester. Material from Crown copyright records made available through the Home Office and the ESRC Data Archive has been used by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. The author is grateful to Derek Deadman, Kevin Lee, Stephen Pudney, David Pyle and Michael Shields for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. The paper has also benefited considerably from insightful comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees. Any remaining errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author.

In this paper we use data from the 1994 and 1996 British Crime Survey (BCS) to examine the under-reporting of property crime. Using bivariate probit analysis (corrected for sample selection), we find a strong association between factors influenced by the economic cycle and individuals’ reporting inclinations. However, we find little evidence to connect reporting to individual criminality, but some association between individual attitudes to the police and the probability of reporting an incident. In general, individuals who are not in the labour market are much less likely to report property crimes compared to individuals who are in work, especially those who suffer some financial loss as a consequence of the crime. These findings have implications for economic models of crime that make use of official statistics. Where previously the ‘dark figure’ of hidden crime has been assumed to vary randomly through time, our results suggest that a large component of hidden crime varies systematically with the economic cycle. The implication of this is that economic models of crime should be corrected to allow for this relationship.


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