In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs as compared to outer London - in...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a large-scale policy intervention the Street Crime Initiative that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional resources...

More policing reduces crime but little is known about the mechanism. Does policing deter crime by reducing its attractiveness, or because it leads to additional arrests of recurrent criminals? This paper provides evidence of a direct link between policing and arrests. During shift changes a...

We analyze the economic consequences on firm profitability, performance, and investments of having another firm in the same market affiliated with a criminal organization. We do so by evaluating the spillover effects of a law providing the judicial administration of organized crime firms through...

In this paper we look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work. To do so we focus on a large-scale policy intervention - the Street Crime Initiative - that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002. This allocated additional...

Crime fell sharply in the United States during the Great Recession, at a time of deep economic decline. This was a puzzle: crime is expected to rise, not fall, when unemployment rises. Using a novel identification strategy, I show that unemployment insurance (UI) benefit extensions can account...

We explore the extent to which increased import competition affected crime in US labor markets between 1990 and 2007, and whether access to unemployment insurance attenuated this relationship. In the average labor market, property crime rates rose by 1.5 percent following a $1000 per worker...

Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers that purport to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature,...

We analyze the economic consequences on firm profitability, performance, and investments of having another firm in the same market affiliated with a criminal organization. We do so by evaluating the spillover effects of a law providing the judicial administration of organized crime firms through...

In this paper we look at the relationship between crime and economic incentives in a different way to other workin this area. We look at changes in unemployment benefits and the imposition of benefit sanctions as a means ofstudying the way that people on the margins of crime may react to...