Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Agustin A. Shehadi C. Author-Name-First: Agustin A. Author-Name-Last: Shehadi C. Title: Governmental (In)Eciencies on Detriment of Crime Abstract: By using data from the Ministry of Security of the Argentine Republic for the year 2017, this paper aims to estimate the degree of substitution between public and private spending, placing in the core of study the relationship between the level of government efficiency and private spending on security. With information about the 24 Argentine jurisdictions, this work uses an autoregressive spatial model (SAC), to control for presumed autocorrelation in the residuals, in order to achieve consistent and unbiased estimations. In this line, the discrepancy between reported crimes and the number of convicts jailed under the respective sentence is taken as an efficiency measure of the government. In this way, the results show the expected signs, except for threats, for which the measure of efficiency takes the opposite sign (i.e. as greater the public spending is, greater private expenses), denoting an inefficiency of government spending. We attribute this finding to the fact that individuals perceive governmental action upon threats as insufficient, hence inducing private spending to cover the public inefficiency. Length: 15 pages Creation-Date: 2020-11 File-URL: https://aaep.org.ar/works/works2020/Shehadi.pdf File-Format: Application/pdf Number: 4412 Classification-JEL: C54, D12, H23, H53, K40 Handle: RePEc:aep:anales:4412