Police reorganization and crime : evidence from police station closures

Policy makers often try to optimize local law enforcement by reorganizing police forces. We study the effects of police reallocation via station closures on municipal crime by exploiting a quasi-experiment where a centrally administered reform substantially reduced the number of police stations. Combining a matching strategy with an event-study design, we do not find aggregate effects on crime. Instead, we find changes in the way theft is committed. We observe increases in car theft, apartment and basement burglary but less bicycle theft. We argue that station closures provide an opportunity for criminals to shift from low-value to high-value theft

Heterogeneity in criminal behavior after child birth: the role of ethnicity

This paper documents behavioral differences in parental criminality between majority and minority ethnic groups after child birth. The particular effect we exploit is that of the gender of the first-born child on fathers’ convictions rates. Based on detailed judicial and demographic data from New Zealand, we first show that the previously documented inverse relationship between having a son and father’s criminal behaviour holds across the average of the population. However, when splitting the fathers’ sample by ethnicity, the effect appears to be entirely driven by the white part of the population and that there is no effect on the native Māori. The strong ethnic divide is observed along many dimensions and challenges the implicitly made assumption in the economics of crime literature that findings are universally applicable across cultures and race

Preferred field of study and academic performance

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability, we provide evidence that students who are not enrolled in their preferred field of study are more likely to change their field, delay graduation and drop out of university. The estimated impact on dropout is particularly strong among students of low socio-economic status and is driven by lower academic performance and motivation

Does low‐pay persist across different regimes? Evidence from German Unification

Using German administrative data, we study across-regime low-pay persistence in the context of an economic transformation process. We first show that individuals' initial allocation to the post-unification low-wage sector was close to random in terms of market-regime unobservables. Consistent with a weak connection between individuals' true productivity and their pre-unification low-wage status, the extent of across-regime state dependence is found to be small and appears to vanish over time. For males, across-regime state dependence is most pronounced among the medium- and high-skilled, suggesting the depreciation of human capital as an explanation

The gender reveal: the effect of sons on young fathers’ criminal behavior and labor market activities

Based on New Zealand's administrative court charges data, we document child gender-specific differences in future criminal behavior of young fathers. The deterrent impact of having a son on the future likelihood of receiving convictions persists for as long as ten years post-childbirth. Utilizing population-wide monthly tax registers and Census data, we provide key insights into the role model hypothesis. We show that young fathers with a son have (i) a higher likelihood of being in employment, (ii) higher wages & salaries, (iii) lower benefit dependency, (iv) better qualification, and (v) a higher likelihood of being in a partnered relationship