Professor Richard Disney

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have been able to raise revenues locally to supplement grants from central government.

Economica (2019) doi:10.1111/ecca.12301

We analyse the impact of nationally regulated pay on the quality of applicants to be police officers across England and Wales, exploiting a unique dataset of individual test scores from the national assessment required of all police applicants, and combining this with data on local labour markets and policing conditions.

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have obtained the right to raise revenues locally to supplement central government grants in order to fund their activities.

Firm-level investment paths are commonly characterised by periods of low or zero investment punctuated by large investment ‘spikes’. We document that such spikes are important for understanding firm and aggregate level investment in the UK.

This briefing note provides background information on the police service in England and Wales. It details recent changes in police numbers and in police funding, and examines some indicators of police performance in the light of these changes. Finally, it considers briefly the Labour Party’s proposal to increase the number of police officers.

We investigate the impact on social welfare of the United Kingdom (UK) policy introduced in 1980 by which public housing tenants (council housing in UK parlance) had the right to purchase their houses at heavily discounted prices. This was known as the Right to Buy (RTB) policy. Although this internationally-unique policy was the largest source of public privatization revenue in the UK and raised home ownership as a share of housing tenure by around 15%, the policy has been little analyzed by economists. We investigate the equilibrium housing policy of the public authority in terms of quality and quantity of publicly-provided housing both in the absence and presence of a RTB policy. We find that RTB can improve the aggregate welfare of low-income households only if the council housing quality is sufficiently low such that middle-wealth households have no incentive to exercise RTB. We also explore the welfare effects of various adjustments to the policy, in particular (i) to reduce discounts on RTB sales; (ii) to loosen restrictions on resale; (iii) to return the proceeds from RTB sales to local authorities to construct new public properties; and (iv) to replace RTB with rent subsidies in cash.

In this briefing note, we examine police officer retention in some detail.

We investigate the impact on social welfare of the United Kingdom (UK) policy introduced in 1980 by which public housing tenants (council housing in UK parlance) had the right to purchase their houses at heavily discounted prices.

Spending on the police in England and Wales was cut by 14% in real terms between 2010–11 and 2014–15. This briefing note, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, places these spending cuts in the context of the large spending increases over the 2000s, and explores the differences between police forces in how they fared over these two periods.

The article looks at credit counseling. Credit counseling is an important component of the consumer credit sector for consumers facing debt problems. Our analysis accounts for the endogeneity of an individual’s financial situation to financial literacy, and the endogeneity of financial literacy to exposure to credit counseling.

This paper analyses the impact of centrally regulated pay on the quality of applicants to be police officers in England and Wales using a unique dataset of individual test scores from the national assessment that is required of all applicants.

Cyclical fluctuations - which affect both asset and labour markets - can have an ambiguous effect on retirement. In this article, first published online on 5 April 2015, the authors explore this issue empirically using data from the British Household Panel Survey, exploiting small area geographic identifiers to match local house prices, earnings and unemployment to respondents.