Unemployment and Violence: ARDL Endogeneity Approach. (Desempleo y violencia: Enfoque de endogeneidad ARDL)

This study examines the link between unemployment and violence by controlling for income and security expenditure as an antidote to reduce violence in Nigeria. Violence claims many lives and properties in the country, which further increased the demand for public security as tax on the nation’s resources. Also, the increased unemployment in Nigeria, deserving urgent attention to be reduced, as literature has pointed out, causes idleness, deception, frustration and anger. The idea of criminal motivation and strain as an inducement to violence are supported by evidence. Considering the nature of the variables in this study, we tested for endogeneity by using annual data set from 1980 to 2015 before proceeding to test for the long-run and short-run relationship. The Bound Test used to test the cointegration while the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) approach was used to conduct endogeneity test. ARDL Instrumental Variable is also employed to determine long-run and short-run estimates. The results showed that unemployment causes violence while income as a variable to economic growth reduces violence at the 1% level of significance. Similarly, the deterrence variable of security expenditure adversely affects violence at the 10% level of significance. Therefore, this study suggests policy to promote economic growth as the means of income-employment generation among the youth and the unemployed. Youth programs should be provided especially among the unemployed by granting credit facilities to finance their own projects and further strengthen the deterrence institutions.