Violent Crime and Unemployment in Nigeria: An ARDL Bound Test Cointegration.

Abstract

This study attempts to examine whether there is a long-run relationship existing between crime rates and unemployment in Nigeria for the period 2004 to 2016. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach was used to determine the cointegration between unemployment and crime rates. The results show that unemployment and crime (murder, armed robbery, robbery, assaults, sexual offense, and cultism) are cointegrated. The empirical findings show that the unemployment rate and violent crime, such as; armed robbery, robbery-murder, assaults, sex violence, and cultism are all cointegrated. The long-run coefficients results indicated that the unemployment rate has a positive and significant effect on murder, sex violence, assaults, and cultism