Job Market Paper

Governments increasingly outsource public services to private actors, but these contracted workers often face a "public-work pay disparity," earning less for their public service work than work in the private market. This paper focuses on the public provision of defense counsel outsourced to private attorneys and explores two main questions: How does the quality of publicly contracted defense attorneys impact case outcomes? And, how do changes in pay influence the composition and performance of these attorneys? Using administrative data from North Carolina, I estimate the quality of private attorneys providing public defense using the quasi-random assignment of attorneys to cases. The results reveal significant variation in attorney quality as measured by the likelihood of case dismissal, incarceration, probation, and pleading guilty. I find that a one SD increase in attorney quality raises the likelihood of case dismissal by 5.5% and reduces the likelihood of incarceration by 6.5% for felony cases. A statewide hourly pay reduction led to negative outcomes for defendants, comparable to a 1 SD decrease in attorney quality. The adverse effects are driven by lower attorney performance and a shift in the pool of contracted attorneys toward less experienced attorneys. My results suggest that new state spending on incarceration was two times as large as the reduction in pay for public attorneys.

with Nolan Pope, Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

Media: The Education Exchange

Firms and schools strive to increase productivity by optimally structuring the schedules of their employees and students. We analyze the impact of non-traditional school calendars on student and teacher productivity. These calendars differentially allocate mandated instructional time by choosing 1) the number of hours in the school day, 2) the number of school days each year, and 3) the distribution of school days throughout the year. To do this, we use administrative data on over 2 million students and exploit the staggered elimination of non-traditional school calendars that vary on these three dimensions. We find that while school schedules have little impact on younger children's learning, school schedules with longer and fewer school days have large negative effects on older students that are equivalent to decreasing teacher quality by nearly one standard deviation. Our results appear to be driven by changes in at-home study behavior and school start times rather than how school days are distributed throughout the year. In addition, school schedules with longer and fewer school days increase teacher turnover. Our results reveal that daily school schedules appear to impact school productivity more than yearly school calendars. 

with George Zuo, under review

Many juvenile crime reduction strategies rely on policing or high-touch programs for youth. We analyze the crime impacts of a program that created modern, digital spaces with high-speed Wi-Fi and devices to connect online in over 1,250 community and recreation centers nationwide. The program significantly decreased juvenile offending by at least 14% and victimization by at least 8% in high-exposure cities. We find no evidence that crime was spatially displaced. We conclude that this model is highly cost-effective, requiring a small startup cost to attract youth to supervised community spaces, and delivers potentially large social benefits.

with Melissa Kearney and Lisa Dettling, working paper

Between 2000 and 2019, the share of US adults married at age 30 fell from 56 percent to 39 percent, with a larger decline among individuals without a college education. One potential explanation for the retreat from marriage among young adults is that housing is “too expensive,” which makes it financially difficult for today’s young adults to establish their own households. In this paper, we examine the link between housing costs experienced by young adults during their twenties--as captured by house prices, mortgage costs, and rents--on their marital status and living arrangements at age 30. Our analysis finds that housing costs can explain less than 2 percent of the aggregate decline in marriage among young adults from 2000 to 2019, and none of the decline among non-college-educated individuals. Overall, we do not find robust evidence that high housing costs are a main driver of the “retreat from marriage” over the past quarter century. 

Work in progress

Nearly 700,000 former inmates are released from prison annually, with 60% rearrested and 40% reincarcerated within three years. Difficulty in securing suitable housing is frequently cited as a key factor contributing to high recidivism rates. In this paper, I leverage the timing of prison releases, which is orthogonal to housing market conditions, to estimate the impact of local housing costs on recidivism using inmate-level data from 38 states. Contrary to initial expectations, I find that higher real rental prices decrease 3-year recidivism rates. To explore potential mechanisms, I analyze living arrangements at prison release using NLSY97 data, finding that higher rental prices increase the likelihood of former inmates residing with non-criminal friends or family. These effects are particularly pronounced among first-time offenders and those convicted of non-violent crimes. Overall, the results suggest that more expensive housing post-incarceration decreases recidivism by either (1) encouraging non-criminal family and friends to house former inmates, and/or (2) fostering stronger social ties through these living arrangements, which lowers the likelihood of reoffending.