Can Digital Financial Inclusion Help Reduce Urban Crime? Evidence from Chinese Criminal Judgment on Theft Cases.

The rapid development of digital finance has changed all aspects of human life and has also had a deep impact on the social governance system. This paper constructs an unbalanced panel of data of the theft crime rates for 289 cities in China during 2014–2019 based on the theft criminal judgments published on China's Judicial Documents website and explores the impact of digital financial inclusion on urban theft crime. It shows that there is a significantly negative correlation between digital financial inclusion and the urban theft crime rate, indicating that the development of digital financial inclusion can effectively reduce urban theft crime, which is also confirmed by instrumental variable analysis based on the spherical distance between cities and Hangzhou, and that digital financial inclusion mainly reduces theft crime committed by more serious and highly educated individuals. In addition, mechanism analysis shows that digital financial inclusion can reduce the expected benefits of theft by enhancing payment convenience and raise the opportunity cost by promoting employment. Therefore, in the Internet era, it is essential for China to continuously improve social governance tools that adapt to the development of new technologies to achieve high-quality urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]