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whether they simply tend to be located in areas that inherently have higher crime rates. In addition, in part due to a lack of readily available databases, many of these studies rely on crime data that has been aggregated to either the census tract level or municipality level, and limit their study to a single decennial census year (a cross-section) and a single category of crime (e.g., Scribner et al., 1995; Scribner et al., 1999; Gorman et al., 1998). Another potential impediment is the high costs involved in accessing and using geographical information systems (GIS) software and its associated spatial databases. This study uses administrative historical liquor licensing data from the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (DABC), incident crime reports from 1992- 2004 with detailed location information from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and a database of all residential property transactions in Los Angeles County between January 1980 and June 2000 from DataQuick, together with census tract demographic data from the 1990 and 2000 decennial census, to understand the magnitude and spatial distribution of the effect of alcohol outlets on crime and urban decay. The variation in the geographical allocation of off -sale retail alcohol outlets over time is used to identify the causal impact of alcohol outlets on crime and urban decay. More specifically, I look at the change in the number of violent and property crimes per square mile per month (from here on to be referred to as the crime density for simplicity) at varying distances (from 0 to 0.5 miles) away from the outlet 24 months before and after the opening or closing of the outlet. By limiting the sample to neighborhoods that experience at least one outlet opening (or closing) during the time frames of the crime (January 1992 -December 2004) and residential property transaction (January 1980 -June 2000) data sets, this event study (Fama et al., 1969; Binder, 1998) specification estimates changes in crime density across areas that are more similar to one another than to other areas in the city. Moreover, I allow for a different time trend before and after the event, outlet tract specific time trends, and include controls for the number of existing outlets in the neighborhood, time fixed effects as well as individual outlet fixed effects. While the original intent was to conduct an event study estimating monthly coefficients following Jacobson, LaLonde and Sullivan (1993), the noisiness of reported crime data led to the use of between one and four estimated coefficients to summarize the effect of alcohol outlet openings and closings over the 49 month interval that I study. 3