Call for Study

Over at Statistical Inference, Juli calls for the following sort of study

Apparently, Friday the 13th is not unlucky, according to Dutch researchers: link to article.

I would like to see a parallel psychological study, to see if people are more careful on Friday the 13th, go out less, drive less (or just shorter distances) - and if people considering criminal activity hold off until the next day. I also wonder if there is an upswing in the types of "bad luck" they chose to survey on Saturday the 14th...

I totally bet you could pull this out of the NIBRS which has data on criminal incident down the calendar day and time of day, in six-hour blocks. I would use a regression discontinuity framework and simply see if Friday 13th crimes are any different from Thursday or Saturday, using the time of day measure as the discontinuity. We should see a statistically significant decrease in crime for that one 24-hour period. Another possibility is that we see an increase in crimes on Thursday the 12th and/or Saturday the 14th, suggesting a kind of queueing of criminal activity as criminals seek to avoid unlucky outcomes on the 13th.

That would actually be a really interesting study, and I bet anything someone is doing it right now.