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The occasional "strike hard" campaigns against crime launched by the Chinese government provide an opportunity to isolate the separate effects of severity and certainty of punishment on the crime rate. The "strike hard" campaigns increase the severity of the punishment but keep the certainty of the punishment unchanged. We use provincial panel data from 1988 to 2015 to examine the impacts of the two strategies on the crime rate with pooled mean group models. The empirical results show that a significant decrease in crime rates is associated with greater certainty of detection, but greater severity has no significant effect. A 1%o increase in the detection rate (a measurement of certainty) predicts about 2.7%o lower crime rate. The results are robust even after considering the endogenous nature ofpunishment policies and controlling for the measurement error in the officially reported data.
Keywords: crime; punishment; severity; certainty; "strike hard" campaigns; China.
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Spending on crime and the judiciary worldwide accounts for more than 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP) (Shaw, Dijk, & Rhomberg, 2003). Proper evaluation of crime-fighting strategies is thus important if public resources are to be used efficiently. Economic theory predicts that harsh punishment for crimes will deter criminality (Becker, 1968). Effective deterrence through harsh punishment depends on certainty, the probability of being punished, and severity, the degree of the punishment. Ensuring certainty suggests increasing judicial expenditure, especially the size of the police force. It emphasizes the importance of optimizing police deployment to minimize the time cost in response to alarm calls (Braga, 2008; Weisburd & Eck, 2004). Severity-oriented policies involve extending the sentences of convicted criminals (Levitt, 1996; Zimring, Hawkins, & Kamin, 2001). However, these two approaches have not demonstrated consistent impacts on criminality.
In this paper, we use the case of China to examine the effect of certainty and severity, given that the legal practices in China are not as institutionalized as in many other countries. The occasional "strike hard" campaigns against crime launched by the Chinese government provide an opportunity to examine the effects of severity and certainty of punishment on the crime rate separately. We use provincial panel data from 1988 to 2015 to test the impacts of the two strategies. Methodologically, punishment policies are by...