Abstract Recognizing the importance of employment, many criminologists have argued that increased unemployment leads to increase of crime. The researches on relationship between unemployment and crime rate treat job as homogeneous in terms of income and stability. The recent studies explore the employment quality influences crime. Researchers have conducted a variety of studies examining the relationship of wages to crime. Some of the findings indicate that increased wages can contribute the lower crime rate. To under how "job market quality" influences crime, researchers define "job marker quality" in a variety of ways. This paper uses the natural logarithm of ratio of the percentage of the civilian that is employed in each industry to represent the "job marker quality". Based-on economic census data and crime data of Shanghai in 2008, the relationship between labor market quality and criminal crime rate estimated by spatial econometric models, the results are shown as follows. First, low-quality labor markets do strong effect to the criminal crime rate. Individual's willingness to engage in criminal activities can be ranked according to their labor force status. The theory behind such a connection is simple:a decline in the wage offer increases the relative payoff of criminal activity thus inducing workers to substitute away from the legal sector towards the illegal sector. The people who work in low-quality industries more likely have a regular pattern of routine activities due as they commute to and from work, and more likely to have earned income, which may produce an income effect by increasing the need to seek additional source of income in possibly less desirable and more dangerous ways. Second, "spatial effects" explain an important component of crime in Shanghai. The "spatial effects" include "spatial lag effect" and "spatial error effect". Third, the spatial econometric model is a good fit model for studying the criminal crime rate and labor market quality.
2013, Vol. 28 
