RETRACTED: Xu, X.; Yang, Y. Can Digital Financial Inclusion Help Reduce Urban Crime? Evidence from Chinese Criminal Judgment on Theft Cases. Systems 2023, 11, 203

The journal retracts the article entitled “Can Digital Financial Inclusion Help Reduce Urban Crime? Evidence from Chinese Criminal Judgment on Theft Cases” by Xu & Yang [1].

Following publication, the authors raised concerns to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding unreliable data, data used without appropriate permission and significant errors within the article [1]. Adhering to our complaints procedure, an investigation was conducted by the Editorial Office and the Editorial Board which confirmed that the theft crime data used were unreliable and the crime rate data and empirical results were derived from Liang’s paper “Digital Finance Development and Crime Governance: Evidence from Criminal Judgments in Theft Cases” [2] without receiving appropriate authorization. It was further confirmed that the article contained a number of significant errors, including errors in the data of control variables, which resulted in an estimation bias in the regression results and errors in the sorting process, which resulted in all empirical regression results of the paper being completely unreliable. As a result, the article has been retracted.

This retraction was approved by the Editor in Chief of the journal Systems.

The authors agreed to this retraction.