Poverty Matters: A Reassessment of the Inequality-Homicide Relationship in Cross-National Studies

Dozens of cross-national studies of homicide have been published. Virtually all have reported an association between inequality and homicide, leading scholars to draw strong conclusions about this relationship. Unfortunately, each of these studies failed to control for poverty, even though poverty is the most consistent predictor of area homicide rates in the US empirical literature and a main confounder of the inequality-homicide association. The cross-national findings are also incongruent with US studies, which have yielded inconsistent results for the inequality-homicide association.