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Working Papers of Interest

6 Comments Posted by on 02/21/2013

A roundup of NBER’s weekly working papers.  It’s a new source that I’ve started checking every week, and it provides a lot of material of interest to this blog.

1.  “The Effect of Police on Crime:  New Evidence from U.S. Cities, 1960-2010″.  Full paper here.  A $1 investment in police saves $1.60 in victimization costs.

2.  Implications of the derived demand for cigarettes as solutions to obesity.  Women more than men smoke cigarettes in order to stave off weight gain.  People who smoke for this reason are less affected by changes in cigarette prices.  This has two implications:  if someone wanted to raise sin tax revenue, people who wanted to lose weight from smoking would be easiest to take advantage of; people who hope to curb teen smoking will have to focus more on girls.

3.  An economic analysis of black-white disparities in NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program.  The researchers argue that police basically waste more time stopping and frisking whites and therefore there is no anti-black bias in the policy.  This is surely a controversial way to look at the program.  Full paper here.

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6 Responses to Working Papers of Interest

  1. Rifleman 02/21/2013 at 2:18 pm

    “An economic analysis of black-white disparities in NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program.”

    As usual another study that pretends that Asians and Latinos don’t exist.

    When is this going to stop?

  2. Camlost 02/21/2013 at 3:27 pm

    I hope the irredeemably racist NYPD stop and frisk program gets shut down forever. lol

  3. SOBL1 02/21/2013 at 4:20 pm

    @Rifleman – I agree with you with regards to the ignoring of 20% of America (asians/hispanics), and wish it’d stop, too. Problem is we don’t control what studies are funded, run and trumpeted. The cathedral does, and Hispanics and Asians don’t fit the narrative of opporesive white majority holding people down. Blacks are much poor socioecnonomic performers than Asians, and even Hispanics, and they commit far more crime so the juxtaposition of black and white in studies fits the liberal, cathedral narrative. Any journo who says they are also an activist is just using two adjectives to describe the same thing in our modern media environment.

  4. C.R. 02/21/2013 at 4:35 pm

    Rifleman,

    The paper addressed blacks and whites because that is the most contentious aspect of the debate. If one can dent the argument that blacks are irrationally profiled against, then you seemingly dent the argument that Hispanics are. I’m kind of the opposite of your thinking in that I’d rather all discussions over discrimination and such focus just on blacks and whites since that is obviously the reason we even discuss discrimination in the first place.

  5. Simon Grey 02/21/2013 at 5:47 pm

    ‘A $1 investment in police saves $1.60 in victimization costs.”

    Ceteris parabis, of course. I imagine that investment is subject to diminishing returns. Also, further investment could increase corruption (since money is to corrupt people what chum is to fish), or could lead to LEOs being more abusive which might in turn lead to blowback. I don’t deny that additional spending on law enforcement can be helpful, but the limits seem pretty obvious, especially in light of how increasingly totalitarian the US has become, particularly in population-dense cities with “vibrant” populations.

  6. Tank 02/22/2013 at 8:28 am

    You rob banks cause that’s where the money is.

    You stop and frisk blacks cause …

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