I am trying to determine if files have been deleted on a MacBook Air.

I am very familiar with HFS+ and know that files are removed from the directory, rather than tagged as deleted, as on the PC (and some others).

Does the Mac have any useful files like Windows event logs, or UserJournal, that logs deletions?

All logs I have looked at /var/log/... do not seem to have any such information
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Michael Cotgrove
www.cnwrecovery.com
www.goprorecovery.co.uk 

NOT an answer to your question, and cannot say if useful in your case, but the Author of Plop has made available recently a nice little "rescue" tool for HFS+:
www.plop.at/en/hfsprescue.html

And Photorec is another "quick" option:
www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Maybe it can be useful to see which deleted files they can find.

jaclaz
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- In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. - 

There are a large amount of .Plist files dotted around the Mac OS X that could be of help but it really determines exactly what kind of files you are looking for.  

Deleted Word documents are of most interest.
_________________
Michael Cotgrove
www.cnwrecovery.com
www.goprorecovery.co.uk 

i havent got an answer but i do have a similar problem (bumping this up in case someone else has found a solution)

trying to find out when a specific file was deleted
the only thing I can think of is to determine if the file was accessed so as to narrow down the last time the file was viewed

can anyone think of anything else?
thanks!