We evaluate the impact on crime of a localized policing experiment that depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth. Such a policy can: (i) impact the demand for cannabis in Lambeth as users move there to purchase cannabis; (ii) enable the Lambeth...

Balanced experimental designs, in which the number of treatment and control units are the same, do not maximize power subject to a cost constraint when treat-ment units are more expensive than control ones. Despite this, such balanced designs are the norm in economics. This paper describes...

In this paper, we provide the first evidence of the effect of the shift to remote work on crime. We examine the impact of the rise of working from home (WFH) on neighborhood-level burglary rates, exploiting geographically granular crime data and a neighborhood WFH measure. We document three key...

Basic methods to compute the required sample size are well understood and supported by widely available software. However, the sophistication of the sample size methods commonly used has not kept pace with the complexity of the experimental designs most often employed in practice. In this paper,...

The UK Welfare Reform Act 2012 imposed a series of welfare cuts, which disproportionately impacted ex-ante poorer areas. In this paper, we consider the impact of these austerity measures on two different but complementary elements of crime - the crime rate and the less-studied concentration of...

This paper investigates the sources of wage growth over the life cycle, where individuals have the possibility to acquire vocational training at the start of their career. Wage growth is determined by sectoral and firm mobility, unobserved ability and the accumulation of human capital. Workers...

This paper assesses the impact of Swedish welfare-to-work programmes on labour market performance including wages, labour market status, unemployment duration and future welfare-to-work participation. We develop a structural dynamic model of labour supply which incorporates detailed...

This paper considers the identification of the effect of tobacco on mortality. If individuals select into smoking according to some unobserved health characteristic, then estimates of the effect of tobacco on health that do not account for this are biased. We show that using information on...

This paper evaluates the effect of excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers. We use a novel way of quantifying passive smoking: we use data on cotinine concentration- a metabolite of nicotine- measured in a large population of non-smokers...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model where individuals differ in ability and location preference to evaluate the mechanisms that affect the evolution of immigrants' careers in conjunction with their re-migration plans. Our analysis highlights a novel form of selective return...