Spatial interaction of crime incidents in Japan

We analyze the development of 18 types of criminal records in Japan for the period 1991–2001 across 47 prefectures with spatial lag and spatio-temporal heteroscedasticity. We explore the hypothesis that crime data are related to socio-economic variables in Japan. We extend the Bayesian approach of LeSage [J.P. LeSage, Bayesian estimation of spatial autoregressive models, Int. Regional Sci. Rev. 20 (1997) 113–129] for spatio-temporal Bayesian models. Additionally we analyze unobserved heteroscedasticity in the panel model by variance inflation factors as in Geweke [J. Geweke, Bayesian treatment of the independent Student-t linear model, J. Appl. Econ. 8 (1993) 19–40]. Positive and significant spatial dependencies can be found for 12 types of crimes and the influence of the socio-economic variables varies over the type of crimes.