 The effect of police on crime: evidence from the 2014 World Cup in São PauloIlaria Masiero LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library Abstract: I estimate the causal impact of police on crime, based on evidence from Brazil. To tackle reverse causality, I consider as a natural experiment the creation of a special police unit to intensify surveillance around a few tournament-related locations in São Paulo during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. To better isolate the specific impact of policing, I account for different ways in which the tournament may affect crime, namely, via fan concentration and voluntary incapacitation. Difference-in-differences estimates reveal that increased police presence leads to significant reductions in criminal activity. My estimate of the crime-police elasticity (–0.37) is close to figures obtained in previous studies, suggesting that this effect is robust across settings and remains stable even in a high-crime, weak-institutions context, as in the case of Brazil. Keywords: police; crime; Brazil; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Economía, 1, October, 2020, 21(1), pp. 47 - 72. ISSN: 1529-7470 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:123389 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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