Pimmy Pinitjitsamut

This paper examines whether fiscal constraints on public-sector compensation reduce police performance, using New Jersey's two percent cap on police arbitration awards (2011–2017). I assemble a new thirty-year dataset of police contracts that pinpoints each agency's contract expiration date, which determines when the cap became binding. The cap bound. Across 460 agencies it reduced negotiated salary schedule increases by 1.99 percentage points against a pre-cap mean of 3.6 percent, and it lowered the entry wage written into contracts by about 4.5 percent. Staggered difference-in-differences estimates of the effect on crime clearance rates are negative but small and imprecise, declines of 1.9 to 2.6 percentage points that are not statistically distinguishable from zero. The muted response is not explained by officers being made whole elsewhere in the contract. The compressed value does not reappear in the uncapped components, such as uniform allowances, tuition stipends, and leave, and at least four fifths of it is unaccounted for on the margins contracts record.

Does pedestrian foot traffic cause crime? Using the universe of 2018–2019 Chicago road closures, I show that closures attracting pedestrians (festivals, block parties) raise foot traffic by about 61% and cause a 59% increase in outdoor crime on the closed block, with no detectable effect on restaurant or residential crime. Closure timing is unrelated to prior crime and pre-trends are flat. Crime therefore rises close to one-for-one with pedestrian exposure, leaving the risk that an additional pedestrian brings essentially unchanged. The presence of more pedestrians does not equate to enhanced safety for each person on the street, which is a fundamental assumption of the natural surveillance concept in pedestrian-focused urban design. The estimate does not distinguish between natural surveillance and a compounding opportunity mechanism. Displacement onto neighboring blocks is statistically indistinguishable from zero, though the design cannot detect first-ring effects below about 38%. Closures diverting pedestrians cut visits by about 10%, a shock the design is not powered to detect.