Life and Death in the Fast Lane: Police Enforcement and Traffic Fatalities
Gregory DeAngelo,Benjamin Hansen +1 more
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In this paper, the authors focus on a mass layoff of Oregon State Police in February of 2003 and find that the subsequent decrease in enforcement is associated with a significant increase in injuries and fatalities.Abstract:
Simultaneity complicates the estimation of the causal effect of police on crime. We overcome this obstacle by focusing on a mass layoff of Oregon State Police in February of 2003. Due solely to budget cuts, 35 percent of the roadway troopers were laid off, which dramatically reduced citations. The subsequent decrease in enforcement is associated with a significant increase in injuries and fatalities. The effects are similar using control groups chosen either geographically or through data-driven methods. Our estimates suggest that a highway fatality can be prevented with $309,000 of expenditures on state police. (JEL H76, K42, R41)read more
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Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature
Aaron Chalfin,Justin McCrary +1 more
TL;DR: The authors review economics research regarding the effect of police, punishments, and work on crime, with a particular focus on papers from the last twenty years, and discuss fruitful directions for future work and implications for public policy.
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Natural Experiments: An Overview of Methods, Approaches, and Contributions to Public Health Intervention Research
TL;DR: Natural experiment (NE) approaches are attracting growing interest as a way of providing evidence in such circumstances as discussed by the authors, and one key challenge in evaluating NEs is selective exposure to the intervention.
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“Soft” policing at hot spots—do police community support officers work? A randomized controlled trial
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the effect of increased police patrols in hot spots on crime reduction in the city of Cambridge, and found that more proactive patrols predicted less crime across treatment hot spots, while more reactive patrols predicted more crime across control hot spots.
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Cherry Picking with Synthetic Controls
TL;DR: It is shown that the speci cation that uses the average pre-treatment outcome values to estimate the weights performed particularly bad in the authors' simulations, and this problem is relevant in simulations with real datasets looking at placebo interventions in the Current Population Survey (CPS).
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Punishment and Deterrence: Evidence from Drunk Driving †
TL;DR: In this article, the effect of harsher punishments and sanctions on driving under the influence (DUI) was studied and the results suggest that the additional sanctions experienced by drunk drivers at BAC thresholds are effective in reducing repeat drunk driving.
References
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ReportDOI
A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix
Whitney K. Newey,Kenneth D. West +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a simple method of calculating a heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix that is positive semi-definite by construction is described.
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Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach
TL;DR: In fact, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay as discussed by the authors, which is the basis for this essay. But, in spite of such diversity, some commonsense properties are not shared.
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How Much Should We Trust Differences-In-Differences Estimates?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey and use OLS to compute the DD estimate of its "effect" as well as the standard error of this estimate.
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Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
David Card,Alan B. Krueger +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of the increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey and Pennsylvania was investigated. And the authors found that restaurants that were initially paying $5.00 per hour or more (and were therefore largely unaffected by the new law) had the same employment growth as stores in Pennsylvania, while stores that had to increase their wages increased their employment.
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Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the applicability of synthetic control methods to comparative case studies and found that, following Proposition 99, tobacco consumption fell markedly in California relative to a comparable synthetic control region, and that by the year 2000 annual per-capita cigarette sales in California were about 26 packs lower than what they would have been in the absence of Proposition 99.