Private Protection and Public Policing

Ross Hickey, Steeve Mongrain, Joanne Roberts and Tanguy van Ypersele

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: This paper looks carefully at situations in which public and private protection are complementary, that is, when private protection must be coordinated with public protection to be effective. For example, home alarms deter theft by being connected to a local police station: if the police do not respond to a home alarm, the home alarm on its own is virtually useless in halting a crime in action. We make a distinction between gross and net complementarity and substitution, where the latter takes into account the effect on the crime rate. We show that when public and private protection are complements the optimal provision of public protection trades offs the manipulation effect of encouraging private protection with the compensatory effect of providing protection to households that do not privately invest. We discuss the implications of our results for policy and empirical research in this area.

Keywords: crime; private protection; policing; externalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 H42 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35pp
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-law and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Private protection and public policing (2021)
Working Paper: Private protection and public policing (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iae:iaewps:wp2019n04

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