Leveraging unprecedented austerity cuts, this paper studies how the closure of over 70% of local police stations– while keeping officer numbers constant affects crime, police effectiveness, civilian cooperation, and residents’ welfare. Combining geo-referenced crime records and victimization survey data, I find that reduced proximity to stations persistently increases violent crime and reduces po lice 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 in the most deprived areas. A counterfactual exercise indicates alternative closure poli cies 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 the impact of migrants’ demand for school places on school displacement and achievement of native students, exploiting the unprecedented migrant inflows into the UK that followed the 2004 EU enlargement. We predict migrants' location in the UK based on a novel instrument that exploits variation from the 1940s dispersal policy of Polish troops. We find that the increased presence of foreign students displaces natives from faith, high-achieving primary schools in the public sector. Natives are displaced towards schools with similar value added and distance from home, but with a higher proportion of lower performing and disadvantaged peers. We find that migrants’ presence is on average associated with lower test scores among natives. We provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that displaced students generate beneficial peer effects on native pupils exposed to them following displacement. These findings suggest that migrants' presence has overall net positive effects on the educational outcomes of natives via gains at the bottom of the attainment distribution. 

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.