OLS may understate the effect of unemployment on crime because of the endogeneity problem (Raphael and Winter-Ember 2001).

Victor Chernozhukov has written:

'Quantile regression with censoring and endogeneity'

'An IV model of quantile treatment effects' -- subject(s): Accessible book

'Rearranging Edgeworth-Cornish-Fisher expansions'

'L1-Penalized Quantile Regression in High Dimensional Sparse Models' -- subject(s): Regression analysis

'Instrumental variable quantile regression' -- subject(s): Accessible book

'Extremal quantities and value-at-risk' -- subject(s): Accessible book

'Estimation and confidence regions for parameter sets in econometric models' -- subject(s): Accessible book

The Great Depression of the 1930s led to dire circumstances for a large share of American households. Contemporaries worried that a number of these households would commit property crimes in their efforts to survive the hard times. The Roosevelt administration suggested that their unprecedented and massive relief efforts struck at the roots of crime by providing subsistence income to needy families. After constructing a panel data set for 83 large American cities for the years 1930 through 1940, we estimated the impact of relief spending by all levels of government on crime rates. The analysis suggests that relief spending during the 1930s lowered property crime in a statistically and economically significant way. A lower bound ordinary least squares estimate suggests that a 10 percent increase in per capital relief spending during the Great Depression lowered property crime rates by close to 1 percent. After controlling for potential endogeneity using an instrumental variables approach, the estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in per capital relief spending lowered crime rates by roughly 5.6 to 10 percent at the margin. More generally, our results indicate that social insurance, which tends to be understudied in economic analyses of crime, should be more explicitly and more carefully incorporated into the analysis of temporal and spatial variations in criminal activity.