Leveraging unprecedented austerity cuts, this paper studies how a large-scale reorganization of police resources induced by the closure of over 70\% of stations -- while keeping force-wide police strength constant -- affects crime, police effectiveness, civilian cooperation, and residents’ welfare. Combining geo-referenced police records and victimization survey data, I find that reduced proximity to stations persistently increases violent crime and reduces police effectiveness. A spatial model of crime and policing highlights heterogeneous shifts in criminal activity.   Concurrently, I document reduced reporting of non-violent offenses, diminished trust in policing, and lower local house prices. A counterfactual exercise indicates alternative closure policies could have mitigated these adverse consequences.

 Understanding parental responses to non-test score attributes is crucial to designing effective school choice systems. We study the impact on parental school choice of qualitative information sessions that mainly offer information about school attributes other than test scores. The outflow to private education is reduced by 17%, with larger responses among relatively advantaged students. Parents respond by increasing take up of state school offers, intensifying competition for seats at oversubscribed schools. Theintervention does not affect parental demand for measurable school attributes. We conclude that low-cost interventions providing qualitative information can improve state schools’ finances and peer quality.

We study how immigration-induced demand shocks affect natives' access to public services by examining competition for primary-school places in England after the 2004 EU enlargement. The post-enlargement inflow was large and concentrated among Polish migrants, whose high Catholic religiosity interacted with England's admissions rules to intensify competition for high performing, state-funded Catholic schools. To address endogenous migrant location choices, we construct an  instrument that predicts post-2004 Polish settlement patterns using the location and capacity of post-World War II Polish resettlement camps digitized from archival records.  Combining this historical variation with administrative data on the universe of pupils in public primary schools, we estimate the causal effects of local exposure to non-native pupils at school entry. We find that higher non-native exposure displaces native pupils from Catholic schools toward non-faith schools and toward schools with slightly weaker baseline performance and a less advantaged pupil intake. Natives exposed to larger inflows experience small declines in test scores at the end of primary school. Using sibling-priority rules and within-school designs with  family fixed effects, we show that these attainment effects are driven primarily by displacement across schools rather than within-school adverse interactions.

Estimation of unintended costs of crime is scarce, although essential. This paper investigates a prominent indirect cost of crime, i.e. the effect of exposure to crime on achievement of pupils enrolled in primary school. I employ novel geo-referenced data on the universe of crimes from police records in London. The analysis takes advantage of the very fine spatial variation in crimes and in pupils' residences, precisely measuring the exposure to crime in the surroundings of pupils' homes. By exploiting the within-school variation in crime,  I find that crime occurring where pupils live has a significant negative impact on pupils' achievement at the final exams of primary school. The heterogeneity analysis shows that high-ability and wealthy students are those who suffer the most from exposure to crime. I find evidence of decreasing marginal sensitivity to crime, as pupils living in less criminal areas suffer the most from exposure to crime. Overall, I interpret this evidence as consistent with a story of scarring effect and adaptation.