Research

Publications:

• The Labor Market Impacts of Reducing Felony Convictions (with Andrew Garin, Dmitri Koustas, Alex Mas, and Crystal Yang) Accepted, American Economic Review: Insights

• Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System: Shadows of Doubt and Beyond  Accepted, Journal of Economic Literature 

• Employers' Neighborhoods and Racial Discrimination (with Sonja Starr) Journal of Legal Studies, January 2024

  • Previous NBER WP Version 

• Misdemeanor Prosecution (with Jennifer Doleac and Anna Harvey)  Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2023

  • Forthcoming version

  • Selected Coverage: Washington Post (Op-Ed), Marginal Revolution,  WBUR, Commonwealth Magazine, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Law360, Time.com (Op-Ed), The Journalist's Resource

  • Previous NBER WP Version

  • Probable Causation Podcast Episode

• The Minimum Wage, EITC, and Criminal Recidivism (with Michael Makowsky) Journal of Human Resources, September 2023

  • VoxEU post

  • NBER WP Version

• Is your Lawyer a Lemon? Incentives and Selection in the Public Provision of Criminal Defense (with Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens)  The Review of Economics and Statistics, May 2021

  • NBER WP Version

• Offenders and SORN Laws (with J.J. Prescott) in Wayne Logan and J.J. Prescott (eds.) Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Laws: An Empirical Evaluation Cambridge University Press (avail. May 2021)

• Do Workers Comply with Salary History Bans: A Survey of Voluntary Disclosure, Adverse Selection, and Unraveling (with Bo Cowgill and Laura Gee), American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, May 2020 

• Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment (with Sonja Starr), Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2018.  Appendix Materials.

  • Previous SSRN Version

  • Selected Media Coverage: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, NPR

  • Brief video summarizing the research on VoxEU

  • Probable Causation Episode 

• The Effect of Criminal Records on Access to Employment (with Sonja Starr), American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, May 2017

• Increasing Employment of People With Records: Policy Challenges in the Era of Ban the Box, Criminology & Public Policy February 2017 (Invited Policy Essay)

• Sex Offenses (with J.J. Prescott), in J. Backhaus (ed.) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, Springer 2015

• Sex Offender Law and the Geography of Victimization (with J.J. Prescott) Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, December 2014

  • Media Coverage: Baltimore Sun

• Sex Offender Registries: Fear Without Function? Journal of Law and Economics, February 2011

  • Media and Blog Coverage: Freakonomics Radio, NPR's On The Media, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Marginal Revolution, Freakonomics

Working Papers:

• Can you Erase the Mark of a Criminal Record? Labor Market Impacts of Criminal Record Remediation (with Andrew Garin, Dmitri Koustas, Alex Mas, and Crystal Yang).  

  • Probable Causation Episode

• Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit (with Bo Cowgill and Laura Gee)  Revise and Resubmit AEJ:Applied

  • NBER Digest Summary (Jan 2021), VoxEU Summary 

• Automating Automaticity: How the Context of Human Choice Affects the Extent of Algorithmic Bias (with Diag Davenport, Jens Ludwig, and Sendhil Mullainathan) 

  • NBER WP Version

  • BFI Summary, The Pie Podcast

• Prosecutorial Reform and Local Crime Rates (with Jennifer Doleac and Anna Harvey) 

Resting Papers:

• Disaggregating the Returns to College