Finders Keepers: Forfeiture Laws, Policing, and Local Budgets
利用警察扣押和地方政府支出的新数据，发现地方政府会削减其他拨款来抵消警察的扣押收入，而警察在考虑这种抵消后仍会提高毒品逮捕率，导致海洛因价格上涨。
To encourage anti-drug policing, the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of the assets that they seize in drug arrests. We use rich new data on police seizures and local spending to explore the reactions of both governments and police to the incentives created by these policies. We find that local governments offset police seizures by reducing their other allocations to police, partially undermining the incentives laid out in statute and diverting the earmarked funds to other purposes. Police, in turn, respond to the real net incentives for seizures, once local offsets are taken into account, by increasing the drug arrest rate. Heroin prices also increase, suggesting that the increased emphasis on anti-drug policing raises the supply costs of illicit drugs. These findings highlight both the promise and pitfalls of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in a federal system: both local agents and intervening governments have sophisticated responses to financial incentives, and these responses must be taken into account in both designing effective policies and evaluating their consequences. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.