Crime and Conflict
The economics of crime is a key policy area and we summarise what we know on this subject in the election analysis "Reducing Crime: More Police, More Prisons or More Pay?" [Full document in Adobe PDF], Olivier Marie, CEP Paper CEPEA007, April 2010.
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We are starting to build up a small body of work in this area, including:
- In "The Crime Reducing Effect of Education" [Full document in Adobe PDF], CEP Discussion Paper 979, May 2010, Stephen Machin, Olivier Marie and Suncica Vujic show that improving education can yield significant social benefits and can be a key policy tool in the drive to reduce crime.
Contact Stephen Machin, email s.machin@ucl.ac.uk, for further details.
- In "Panic on the Streets of London: Police. Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks" [Full document in Adobe PDF], CEP Discussion Paper 852, February 2008, Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt use the redistribution in policing that resulted from the London bombings to estimate the effect of policing on crime: 10 per cent more police leads to 3 per cent less crime.
Contact Stephen Machin, email s.machin@ucl.ac.uk, for further details.
- In "Conflict-Induced Displacement and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina" [Full document in Adobe PDF] CEP Discussion Paper 777, (Revised) November 2007, Florence Kondylis investigates the consequences of displacement from conflict finding large negative effects on employment.
Contact Florence Kondylis, email f.kondylis@lse.ac.uk, for futher details.
- In "Panic on the Streets of London" [Full document in Adobe PDF] CentrePiece Volume 11, Issue 2, Autumn 2006 article, Mirko Draca and co-authors, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt, look at the impact of the increased security presence on criminal activity in the weeks and months after the London terrorist bombings of 7 July 2005.
Contact Mirko Draca, by email, for further details.
- In "Can More Police Resources Reduce Crime?" [Full document in Adobe PDF] CentrePiece Volume 10, Issue 3, Winter 2005 article, Stephen Machin and Olivier Marie find that the Street Crime Initiative, introduced in 2002, has been highly effective in reducing the number of robberies. Increased police resources can have a big impact on crime rates.
Contact Stephen Machin, email s.machin@ucl.ac.uk, for further details.
- In "Crime and Police Resources: The Street Crime Initiative" [Full document in Adobe PDF] CEP Discussion Paper 680, March 2005, Stephen Machin and Olivier Marie look at links between police resources and crime in a different way to the existing economics of crime work by focusing on a large-scale policy intervention - the Street Crime Initiative - that was introduced in England and Wales in 2002.
Contact Stephen Machin, email s.machin@ucl.ac.uk, for further details.
- In "Crime and Benefit Sanctions" [Full document in Adobe PDF], CEP Discussion Paper 645, August 2004, Stephen Machin and Olivier Marie look at changes in unemployment benefits and the imposition of benefit sanctions as a means of studying the way that people on the margins of crime may react to economic incentives.
Contact Stephen Machin, email s.machin@ucl.ac.uk, for further details.