The Economics of Public Safety
type: CreativeWork
description: Public safety is one of many measures that reflect the development of a nation. It is important to analyze and identify the cause of criminal activities that disturb public safety. Some of the causes are the unintended consequences arisen from public policies and the structure of the market. The chapters of my dissertation focus on the causal mechanism of the three important aspects of public safety: crime, domestic violence, and suicide. In the first chapter, I examine the unintended consequences of centralized online marketplace on petty theft. Market centralization has been shown to improve market efficiency and stability. But, centralized markets have had a considerable impact on market exchanges that could result in non-violent criminal behavior. Using crime data from 1991 to 2014, I examine the effect of Craigslist - a locally centralized online marketplace - on bike theft. In addition, since Craigslist became available in each location at different time periods, the introduction of Craigslist yields heterogeneous treatment effects across groups of locations based on the year of entry. I exploit the semi-parametric differential-timing difference-in-differences method introduced by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2020) to estimate the Craigslist effect. I also decompose the ordinary difference-in-differences with two-way-fixed-effect estimates using Goodman-Bacon (2021) decomposition to show that these estimates are biased. I find that bike theft increased about 11% in Craigslist's service areas compared to non-service areas, while other types of property and violent crime are not affected by the entry of Craigslist. In the second chapter, my co-authors and I examine the impact of three pandemic safeguards which are shelter-in-place, school and daycare closure orders on household violence. There is considerable variation in the data samples used in previous work, which include geographic units included in the analysis and time frames studied. In this work, we include t…
abstract: Public safety is one of many measures that reflect the development of a nation. It is important to analyze and identify the cause of criminal activities that disturb public safety. Some of the causes are the unintended consequences arisen from public policies and the structure of the market. The chapters of my dissertation focus on the causal mechanism of the three important aspects of public safety: crime, domestic violence, and suicide. In the first chapter, I examine the unintended consequences of centralized online marketplace on petty theft. Market centralization has been shown to improve market efficiency and stability. But, centralized markets have had a considerable impact on market exchanges that could result in non-violent criminal behavior. Using crime data from 1991 to 2014, I examine the effect of Craigslist - a locally centralized online marketplace - on bike theft. In addition, since Craigslist became available in each location at different time periods, the introduction of Craigslist yields heterogeneous treatment effects across groups of locations based on the year of entry. I exploit the semi-parametric differential-timing difference-in-differences method introduced by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2020) to estimate the Craigslist effect. I also decompose the ordinary difference-in-differences with two-way-fixed-effect estimates using Goodman-Bacon (2021) decomposition to show that these estimates are biased. I find that bike theft increased about 11% in Craigslist's service areas compared to non-service areas, while other types of property and violent crime are not affected by the entry of Craigslist. In the second chapter, my co-authors and I examine the impact of three pandemic safeguards which are shelter-in-place, school and daycare closure orders on household violence. There is considerable variation in the data samples used in previous work, which include geographic units included in the analysis and time frames studied. In this work, we include t…
author: Le, Uyen
keywords: COVID, Craigslist, Crime, Domestic Violence, Public Safety, Suicide, Economics
date published: 2022-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:40:15Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University