Who Suffers More from Crime?

Existing studies aimed at identifying individuals or economic agents that suffer more from crime than others are based on the incidence of crime or the proportion of agents within a group that experience one or more incident of crime during a given period of time. This paper shows that studies based solely on the incidence of crime may provide a misleading picture as to who suffers more from crime. In a sample of about 6,000 manufacturing firms in 14 Latin American countries, we find that large firms are more likely to experience an incident of crime than the small firms in a given year. However, the burden of crime measured by losses due to crime as a percentage of firms’ annual sales is heavier on the smaller firms.