In this paper, we exploit the exogenous rise of Chinese imports in US to investigate the effect of import competition on crime at county level. Our results indicate that counties with high exposure to Chinese import competition are with high crime rates while the exposure effect on property crime is much larger than that for violent crime: one standard deviation increase of exposure will increase 2.1 more violent crimes in the county while such increase of exposure will cause 26.5 more property crimes. Interestingly, we find that the crime impact of exposure to Chinese import competition disappears in counties with high government transfer
