We argue that the key impediment to accurate measurement of the effect of police on crime is not necessarily simultaneity bias, but bias due to mismeasurement of police. Using a new panel data set on crime in medium to large U.S. cities over 1960- 2010, we obtain measurement error corrected...

The increasing availability of large administrative datasets has led to a particularly exciting innovation in criminal justice research, that of the "low-cost" randomized trial in which administrative data are used to measure outcomes in lieu of costly primary data collection. In this paper, we...

This paper offers experimental evidence that crime can be successfully reduced by changing the situational environment that potential victims and offenders face. We focus on a ubiquitous but surprisingly understudied feature of the urban landscape - street lighting - and report the first...

For every crime there is a victim. However nearly all studies in the economics of crime have focused the causal determinants of criminality. We present novel evidence on the causal determinants of victimization, focusing on legal access to alcohol. The social costs of alcohol use and abuse are...

A large body of evidence documents a link between alcohol consumption and violence involving intimate partners and close family members. Recent scholarship suggests that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders, there has been a marked increase in domestic...

We report the first empirical estimate of the race-specific effects of larger police forces in the United States. Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus white victims. At the same time, larger police...

We study how public sector workers balance their professional motivations with private economic concerns, focusing on police arrests. Arrests made near the end of an officer's shift typically require overtime work, and officers respond by reducing arrest frequency but increasing arrest quality....

Did anti-Asian violence rise after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? Efforts to answer this question are compromised by the inherent difficulty of measuring racially-motivated crimes as well as concerns that reporting of racially-motivated hate crimes may have changed due to their increased...

While linking records across large administrative datasets ["big data"] has the potential to revolutionize empirical social science research, many administrative data files do not have common identifiers and are thus not designed to be linked to others. To address this problem, researchers have...

Can gun violence be deterred at low cost? We report the results of a randomized experiment of a messaging intervention which was designed to reduce gun violence among individuals under parole supervision with a prior violent felony conviction or firearm arrest. The intervention consisted of a...