False proxies for enforcement distortions in "policing for profit"research Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Concerns about law enforcer incentives being affected by a desire to raise revenue for their departments or other governmental units has led to considerable research. Part of this scholarship attempts to identify a causal relationship between monetary incentives and distortions in enforcer behavior. Because enforcer behavior is often unobservable, they rely on proxies like arrests or citations to infer distortions in behavior. I construct a simple model which reveals that in general there is no meaningful relationship between these measures and enforcer incentives or behavior, and therefore these measures may be false proxies.

published proceedings

  • ECONOMICS LETTERS

author list (cited authors)

  • Mungan, M. C.

citation count

  • 0

complete list of authors

  • Mungan, Murat C

publication date

  • September 2023