Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58510 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6477
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper exploits dictated delays in local police hiring by a centralized national authority to break the simultaneity between police and crime. In Italy police officers can only be hired through lengthy national public contests which the Parliament, the President, and the Court of Auditors need to approve. Typically it takes three years before the requested police officers are recruited and become operational. We show that this endogeneity vanishes once, controlling for countrywide year effects, we use positive changes in the number of police officers. The availability of data on two police forces, specialized in fighting different crimes, provides convincing counterfactual evidence on the robustness of our results. Despite the inefficient hiring system, regular Italian police forces seem to be as efficient in fighting crimes as the US ones, with two notable exceptions: auto thefts and burglaries.
Subjects: 
police
crime
JEL: 
H7
H72
H76
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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