| Pawnbroking is an industry that straddles two economic domains; finance and retail trade. The business is ever evolving, exploring new ways to continue a very old service. Recent research suggests the explosive growth in pawnshop numbers over the last thirty years is directly related to the increase in the ''unbanked'' population as banks leave the inner-city. Literature about the industry is sparse, with much built on prior works. This research explores the factors linked to the rapid increase in shops with a combination of data derived mostly from Dallas, Texas. It is composed of data from the Dallas Police's electronic record of all pawn transactions in Dallas between 1991 and 2001 and a random selection of pawn tickets. From those statistics, a 3000 randomly selected pawn customer list was stratified into ten frequency-of-transaction classes which allowed the development of a profile of the pawn customers. Bolstering the empirical data extracted from that source are interviews with property crime offenders, police officers and pawnbrokers. Many factors arise out of what is developed in the pooled statistics. Two of the most important are that they verify that the explosive growth in pawnshops has more issues than the lack of banks in the less affluent neighborhoods as suggested by some articles; and that the traffic in stolen goods is not as miniscule as the pawn industry and many experts claim. Most significant is the legislated environment for pawn brokering. If the barriers to entry are too high or the interest rate too low for a profit, then the expansion in the number of pawnshops will be miniscule. |
