False proxies for enforcement distortions in “policing for profit” research

Murat C. Mungan

Economics Letters, 2023, vol. 230, issue C

Abstract: Concerns about law enforcer incentives being affected by a desire to raise revenue for their departments or other governmental units has led to considerable research. Part of this scholarship attempts to identify a causal relationship between monetary incentives and distortions in enforcer behavior. Because enforcer behavior is often unobservable, they rely on proxies like arrests or citations to infer distortions in behavior. I construct a simple model which reveals that in general there is no meaningful relationship between these measures and enforcer incentives or behavior, and therefore these measures may be ‘false proxies’.

Keywords: Policing for profit; Crime; Enforcement; Speeding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K00 K14 K40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176523002628
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:230:y:2023:i:c:s0165176523002628

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111237

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().