Working Papers


Parole Supervision on the Margins.

Deterring Gun Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in New York City (with Oludamilare Aboaba, Aaron Chalfin, Lucie Parker, and Patrick Sharkey).

Parole Officer Effects on Reentry: Support, Deterrence, and Bias.

Using Technology to Reduce the Cost of High Dosage Tutoring: Experimental Evidence (with Monica Bhatt, Jonathan Guryan, and Salman Khan) (available upon request).


Publications


(A Structural Model of) The Effects of High School Career and Technical Education on Employment, Wages, and Educational Attainment. 2023, Journal of Human Capital 17(1): 39-71.
Additional files: Appendix and Stata, Matlab, and Fortran Code.

Knowledge About Others Reduces One's Own Sense Of Anonymity (with Anuj Shah), 2022. Nature 603: 297–301.

Street Light Outages, Public Safety and Crime Attraction (with Aaron Chalfin and Jacob Kaplan), 2022. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 38: 891–919.

Can Precision Policing Reduce Gun Violence? Evidence from “Gang Takedowns” in New York City (with Aaron Chalfin and Jacob Kaplan), 2021. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 40(4): 1047-1082.


Works in Progress


One Size Doesn’t Fit All – The Heterogeneous Effects of Prison Programs

A majority of incarcerated individuals in state and federal prisons are enrolled in treatment programs during their stay. These include cognitive behavioral therapy programs, drug treatment programs, and violence prevention programs. However, little causal evidence exists about the effectiveness of these programs on in-custody and post-release success. This work leverages nearly twenty different discontinuities in the risk and need assessment scores that determine program enrollment in Pennsylvania, to evaluate the effects of each program on individuals at different margins of enrollment. Preliminary results show that effects of each program on in custody behavior, post-release recidivism, and post-release employment differ notably for different types of incarcerated individuals. Explanations for these heterogeneous effects – and the characteristics of the incarcerated individuals for which each program does or does not appear effective – are discussed.



Within-Officer Bias in Arrest and Use of Force Decisions – Evidence from Dallas (with Adam Soliman)

Prior work has shown differences in arrest and use of force propensity across officers in the same police department. This work investigates the extent to which individual officers show differences in arrest and use of force propensity from one arrest to the next, based on the prior crimes the officer responded to that day, the time already spent on shift that day, and other exogenous factors impacting the officer at the time of the call. I then discuss the extent to which these within-officer differences can be used as an instrument to evaluate the long-term effects of arrests and use of force incidents on potential arrestees.



Neighborhood Beautification and Crime – The Effects of the Toronto Street Arts Initiative (with Katherine DeCelles and Nicola Lacerta)

The Toronto Street Arts Initiative is a series of murals and art instillations painted and installed throughout Toronto over the past decade. How did these beautification efforts impact the city? This work examines the effect of each individual art installation on local crime, using a difference in differences framework that leverages the quasi-random timing of launch and location of each art project.



The Effects of Mandatory Minimum Sentence Laws on Crime, Incarceration, and Plea Bargaining

I estimate the effects of U.S. mandatory minimum sentence laws on crime rates, incarceration rates, and plea bargaining rates using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. First, I compile all state and national mandatory minimum law changes over the past 25 years, with a particular focus on mandatory minimum sentence laws relating to drug crimes (marijuana, cocaine, and heroine). I use plea bargaining data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) State Court Processing (SCP) statistics, which covers 40 of the most populous counties in the United States, located across 25 states. I use incarceration data from the BJS’s National Prisoner Statistics (NPS) program, and crime data from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program and the National Incidence-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Complied mandatory minimum law changes show that, over time, southern states have had the harshest mandatory minimum sentence laws followed by states in the upper Midwest, while states in the west and lower Midwest have had the most lenient mandatory minimum sentence laws. Additionally, compiled mandatory minimum law changes show that there has been substantial number of minor and moderate changes in state mandatory minimum sentence laws over the past 25 years, both in the crimes that carry mandatory minimum sentences and in the sentences for those crimes. Preliminary estimation results are forthcoming.