Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Organizational structure, police activity and crime

Itai Ater, Yehonatan Givati and Oren Rigbi ()

Journal of Public Economics, 2014, vol. 115, issue C, 62-71

Abstract: How does the organizational structure of law enforcement agencies affect police activity and crime? We examine the consequences of an organizational reform in Israel that transferred the responsibility for housing arrestees from the police to the prison authority. Using the staggered rollout of the reform in different regions of the country, we document strong evidence that this organizational change led to an increase of 11% in the number of arrests and to a decrease of 4% in the number of reported crimes, with these effects concentrated in more minor crimes. The reform also led to a decrease in the quality of arrests, measured by the likelihood of being charged following an arrest. These findings are consistent with the idea that the reform externalized the cost of housing arrestees from the police's perspective, and therefore led the police to increase its activity against crime.

Keywords: Organizational structure; Economics of crime; Jails; Arrests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H10 K14 K40 L30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272714000851
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:pubeco:v:115:y:2014:i:c:p:62-71

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.04.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

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

 
Page updated 2024-06-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:115:y:2014:i:c:p:62-71