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We examine the effects of an annual government social safety net payment on crime by leveraging geographic and intertemporal variation in the magnitude and timing of earned income tax credit (EITC) payments, combined with crime micro-data. We find that drug-related crimes increase somewhat, whereas burglary and robbery decrease substantially within three weeks following peak EITC payments. Noneconomic crimes remain unchanged. Leveraging additional temporal variation in EITC disbursements induced by the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act in 2017 confirms our findings.
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Brau et al. (2026) studied this question.
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