The article investigates the effect of crime on firm entry rates in Italian provinces over the period 2007–2016. The extant literature focuses mainly on the relationship between crime and the sorting of new businesses. The present paper contributes to this stream of work by estimating the effect of crime on the overall propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities across a national territory. We measure the extent to which property and violent crime affect firm entry rates using an instrumental variable approach in which the instrument for criminal activity is the effective abortion rate. Our findings suggest that crime has a negative, sizable impact on firm entry. The results are robust to alternative instrumental variables and firm entry indicators. This empirical exercise emphasizes the need to consider loss of new business activities as a downstream effect when computing the social costs of crime.

中文翻译：

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犯罪对企业进入的影响

本文调查了 2007 年至 2016 年期间犯罪对意大利各省企业进入率的影响。现有文献主要关注犯罪与新业务分类之间的关系。本论文通过估计犯罪对在全国范围内从事创业活动的总体倾向的影响，为这方面的工作做出了贡献。我们使用工具变量方法衡量财产和暴力犯罪对公司进入率的影响程度，其中犯罪活动的工具是有效堕胎率。我们的研究结果表明，犯罪对企业进入具有相当大的负面影响。结果对于替代工具变量和公司进入指标是稳健的。