Archives - Page 2

• Does Proactive Policing Really Increase Major Crime? A Replication Study of Sullivan and O’Keeffe (Nature Human Behaviour, 2017)

  Vol. 3 No. 6 (2024)

  In December 2014 and January 2015, police officers in New York City engaged in an organized
  slowdown of police work to protest the murder of two police officers who were targeted by a
  gunman while sitting in their patrol car. An influential 2017 article in Nature Human Behaviour
  studies the effect of the NYPD’s work slowdown on major crimes and concludes that the slowdown
  led to a significant improvement in public safety. Contrary to the remainder of the literature, the
  authors conclude that proactive policing can cause an increase in crime. We re-evaluate this claim
  and point out several fatal weaknesses in the authors’ analysis — which purports to be a difference in-
  differences analysis but isn’t — that call this finding into question. In particular, we note that
  there was considerable variation in the intensity of the slowdown across NYC communities and
  that the communities which experienced a more pronounced reduction in police proactivity did not
  experience the largest reductions in major crime. The authors’ analysis constitutes a quintessential
  fallacy in statistical reasoning, a logical miscalculation in which inferences from aggregated data are mistakenly applied to a more granular phenomenon. We raise several additional and equally
  compelling concerns regarding the tests presented in the paper and conclude that there is little
  evidence that the slowdown led to short-term changes in major crimes in either direction.
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• Does Mask Usage Correlate with Excess Mortality? Findings from 24 European Countries. A Comment on Tausk and Spira (BMC Public Health, 2025)

  Vol. 5 No. 9 (2026)

• Knowledge Transfers from Multinational to Domestic Firms: Evidence from Worker Mobility. A Replication Study of Poole (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013)

  Vol. 2 No. 3 (2023)

• The Common Problem of Bad Controls in Tests of the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis. A Comment on Ayres et al. (PNAS, 2023) and related literature

  Vol. 4 No. 9 (2025)

  Languages encode the future differently, such that languages can be sorted into different types. When
  making future predictions, Strong Future Time Reference (FTR) languages often require marking
  future-time, whereas weak FTR languages do not. The Linguistic Savings Hypothesis predicts this
  difference will affect people’s patience, perhaps because weak FTR languages make the future feel
  closer. Three recent articles have reported significant effects on individual patience as well as
  firm-level income smoothing and investment efficiency. However each paper includes controls which
  increase bias, rather than reduce it. Due to data sharing limitations, I can only publish a reanalysis in
  one case; fixing the problem leaves smaller and non-significant effects. This problem does not affect
  all research on the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis, but the effects are not as large or widespread as
  previously reported.