In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large deployment of police officers to central London boroughs as compared to outer London -in fact, police deployment in central London increased by over 30 percent in the six weeks following the July 7 bombings. During this time crime fell significantly in central relative to outer London. Study of the timing of the crime reductions and their magnitude, the types of crime which were more likely to be affected and a series of robustness tests looking at possible biases all make us confident that our research approach identifies a causal impact of police on crime. Implementing an instrumental variable approach shows an elasticity of crime with respect to police of approximately -0.3, so that a 10 percent increase in police activity reduces crime by around 3 percent.

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Principals who exercise favouritism towards certain agents may harm those who are not so favoured. We address this issue in the context of a natural experiment from English soccer. We study the effects of professional referees on a common measure of referee bias: length of injury time in close matches. We find that referees exercised a degree of favouritism prior to professionalism but not afterwards, having controlled for selection and soccer-wide effects. We also discuss the suitability of the variable that we, and others, use to measure favouritism, noting that alternative interpretations may be possible.

This paper uses aggregate data from 42 police-force areas over 12 years to test predictions of Becker's economic model of crime. The effects of measures for deterrence on the incidence of three types of acquisitive criminal activity (burglary, theft, robbery) in England and Wales are explored. Mixed support for the Becker model emerges. The growth in unemployment is seen to impact positively on two of the three types of criminal activity examined. Per capita household income is seen to have a negative effect on the recorded rates of burglary and theft, but there is some evidence that the income variable is a proxy for the effects of unemployment. Poor housing conditions and the relative youth of the population were also found to play a role in the determination of criminal activity.