“Every recession since the late ’50s has been associated with an increase in crime and, in particular, property crime and robbery, which would be most responsive to changes in economic conditions,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri.

Indeed, when the markets crashed in 1987, New York City had to deal with a record murder rate the following year. During the financial crisis of the 1970s the city averaged 294 robberies per day.

“You see a strong relationship between falling wages and higher unemployment rates for less educated men and crime rates that tend to go up,” said Bruce A. Weinberg, an associate professor of economics at The Ohio State University, who studied data from 1979 to 1997.