Ben Vollaard

Does Regulation of Built-In Security Reduce Crime? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

As of 1999, all new-built homes in the Netherlands have to have burglary-proof windows and doors. We provide evidence that this large-scale government intervention in the use of self-protective measures lowers crime and improves social welfare. We find the regulatory change to have reduced burglary in new-built homes from 1.1 to 0.8 percent annually, a reduction of 26 percent. The findings suggest that burglars avoid old, less-protected homes that are located in the direct vicinity of the new, better-protected homes. The presence of a negative externality on older homes is ambiguous. We find no evidence for displacement to other property crimes including theft from cars and bicycle theft. Even though the regulation of built-in security does not target preventative measures at homes that are most at risk, the social benefits of the regulation are likely to exceed the social costs.

The Engine Immobiliser: A Non‐Starter for Car Thieves

We provide evidence for a beneficial welfare impact of a crime policy that is targeted at strenghtening victim precaution. Regulation made application of the electronic engine immobilizer, a simple and low-cost anti-theft device, mandatory for all new cars sold within the European Union as of 1998. We exploit the regulation as source of exogenous variation in use of the device by year of manufacture of cars. Based on detailed data at the level of car models, we find that uniform application of the security device reduced the probability of car theft by an estimated 50 percent on average in the Netherlands during 1995-2008, accounting for both the protective effect on cars with the device and the displacement effect on cars without the device. The costs per prevented theft equal some 1,500 Euro; a fraction of the social benefits of a prevented car theft.

Preventing Crime Through Selective Incapacitation

Making the length of a prison sentence conditional on an individual’s offense history is shown to be a powerful way of preventing crime. Under a law adopted in the Netherlands in 2001, prolific offenders could be sentenced to a prison term that was some ten times longer than usual. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in the moment of introduction and the frequency of application across 12 urban areas to identify the effect. We find the sentence enhancements to have dramatically reduced theft rates. The size of the crime-reducing effect is found to be subject to sharply diminishing returns.

Why the Police Have an Effect on Violent Crime After All: Evidence from the British Crime Survey

We present evidence that the use of police statistics as a source of crime data can seriously bias empirical tests of the model of deterrence. We use data for 21 areas in England and Wales in 2001–8. In addition to police-recorded crime data, we use victim-reported crime data from the British Crime Survey that are unaffected by changes in public reporting of crime and police recording of crime. We find that the estimated effect of the number of police on recorded and victim-reported crime is similar for property crime but different for violent crime. Our findings suggest that higher numbers of police not only reduce crime rates but also increase the share of crime, and in particular violent crime, that finds its way into police statistics. The resulting estimation bias is found to be large.

The Power of a Bad Example – A Field Experiment In Household Garbage Disposal

Field-experimental studies have shown that people litter more in more littered environments. Inspired by these findings, many cities around the world have adopted policies to quickly remove litter. While such policies may prevent people from following the bad example of litterers, they may also invite free-riding on public cleaning services. We are the first to show that both forces are at play. We conduct a natural field experiment where, in a randomly assigned part of a residential area, the frequency of cleaning was drastically reduced during a three-month period. We find evidence that some people start to clean up after themselves when public cleaning services are diminished. However, the tendency to litter more dominates. We also find that these responses continue to exist for some time after the treatment has ended.

Oil Pollution in the Dutch Sector of the North Sea

Oil pollution is a serious issue in the Netherlands ever since merchant and military vessels with diesel engines gradually replaced vessels operating sails and steam engines in the early twentieth century. Arguably, the southern North Sea became one of the most heavily oil-polluted sea areas in the world as a result of chronic oil pollution. Major shipping incidents resulting in massive oil spills have, however, been rather rare within the area. In the early twenty-first century, the number of detected oil spills has markedly declined and levels of chronic oil pollution are currently rather low. Most detections of oil slicks are still concentrated around the major shipping lanes and off major ports such as Rotterdam and IJmuiden (leading to Amsterdam).

Salience of Law Enforcement: A Field Experiment

We conduct a field experiment to examine whether the deterrent effect of law enforcement depends on the salience of law enforcement activity. Our focus is on illegal disposal of household garbage in residential areas. At a random subset of 56 locations in a mid-sized city, law enforcement officers supplemented their regular enforcement activities by the practice of putting brightly-colored warning labels on illegally disposed garbage bags. This treatment made the existing enforcement activities suddenly much more apparent to residents. We find evidence for a substantial reduction in illegal disposal of garbage in response to the treatment.