I estimate the causal impact of police on crime based on evidence from Brazil. To tackle reverse causality, I consider as a natural experiment the creation of a special police unit to intensify surveillance around a few tournament-related locations in São Paulo during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. To better isolate the specific impact of policing, I account for different ways in which the tournament may affect crime, namely via fan concentration and voluntary incapacitation. Difference-in-differences estimates reveal that increased police presence leads to significant reductions in criminal activity. My estimate of the crime-police elasticity (-0.37) is close to figures obtained in previous studies, suggesting that this effect is robust across settings and remains stable even in a high-crime, weak-institution context such as the Brazilian one.

We explore whether including cultural reforms in an intra-state peace accord facilitates its success. We distinguish between accommodationist and integrationist cultural provisions and employ a mixed research method combining negative binomial regression on a data set of all intra-state political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2017, and an in-depth analysis of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland. We recognize the important reassuring effect of accommodationist cultural reforms in separatist conflicts. However, we also find that they have an important and hitherto overlooked reputational effect across all conflict types. By enhancing the reputation of negotiating leaders, accommodationist cultural provisions contribute to ending violence by preventing leadership challenges, rebel fragmentation and remobilization across all civil conflicts. By the same logic, and despite the overwhelming emphasis of peace agreements on integrationist cultural initiatives, integrationist cultural reforms problematize leaders' ability to commit to pacts and to ensure compliance among their rank and file.

I investigate the relationship between sports-based entertainment and crime using nine years of hourly data on robberies and thefts by police district in São Paulo linked to information on 430 football matches. Results report a citywide voluntary incapacitation impact and a local spatial concentration effect. Robberies significantly drop during matches, especially high-audience ones. Around the stadiums, this effect is outweighed by that of concentration. While I find no evidence of spatial displacement, temporal displacement is at play, with offenses being moved up to pre-game time. I show that the game-crime link is likely deployed through potential criminals rather than victims.