Research

Abstract: Most U.S. criminal defendants are represented by public defenders (PDs), who consistently face higher caseloads than recommended by professional guidelines. I study the effect of high caseloads using novel data from three U.S. counties and quasi-random variation in case assignment timing. Higher caseloads do not change conviction rates but lengthen sentences significantly: shifting a PD from the 25th to 75th percentile of their caseload nearly doubles average sentence length. PDs facing high caseloads maintain time spent on high-severity felonies at the expense of lower severity cases. These results suggest counties may realize substantial cost-savings on incarcerations by hiring additional PDs.

Abstract: We randomize provision of attorneys to tenants facing eviction in Memphis, Tennessee (N = 265 treatment, 753 control), who otherwise seldom have legal representation. Despite landlord-friendly eviction law, providing an attorney reduces tenant eviction judgment rates within 90 days by 27 percentage points (50%). However, attorneys’ effects persist only when they can connect tenants to other services. Once a concurrent emergency rental assistance program expires, effects on judgments at 90 days shrink by about 70% and are indistinguishable from zero. Attorneys have little effect on informal outcomes and bargaining. Incentivized surveys suggest tenants’ willingness to pay for an attorney is double attorneys’ price, and seven times attorneys’ implied impacts on tenants’ incomes via stopping evictions. This high willingness to pay does not appear to result from elicitation errors, misperceptions, or binding budget constraints. We contrast lawyers’ Marginal Value of Public Funds from using elicited willingness to pay (MVPF = 2.7 without rental assistance, ignoring impacts on landlords or general equilib- rium) versus a standard calibrated approach (MVPF = 0.4).

Abstract: Tax authorities use audits to detect and deter tax evasion. In practice, they commonly rely on quantitative predictions about taxpayers’ noncompliance to inform their decisions about which taxpayers to audit. We study the problem of optimal audit selection in this context. Specifically, we investigate how variation in the distribution of predicted noncompliance across taxpayers, including the uncertainty in quantitative predictions, shapes optimal audit policy. Our results highlight the contribution of these factors through a sufficient statistics characterization of the optimal audit selection rule. We leverage this characterization to quantify the social welfare benefit of varying the information available to the tax authority, for example by expanding third-party information reporting.

Abstract: Public discourse about in-kind transfers often appeals to “preferences for rights” — for instance, the “right to health care” or “right to counsel” for indigent legal defense. Preferences for rights are “non-welfarist” if the person values the right per se, holding fixed how the right instrumentally affects others’ utilities. We test for non-welfarist preferences for rights, and their relationship to redistributive choices, with incentivized online experiments (N = 1,800). Participants face choices about allocating rights goods (lawyers, health care) and benchmark goods (bus passes, YMCA memberships) to tenants facing eviction. We implement a share of choices. In two of three experiments, more than half of participants allocate rights goods in ways that are consistent with preferences for rights and dominated if preferences were entirely welfarist. Dominated behaviors are more common with rights goods than benchmarks. In a fourth experiment, those with preferences for rights also exhibit “anti-targeting,” where they redistribute lawyers and health care more universally than benchmark goods to recipients whose incomes differ. At least 26% of participants are non-welfarist, while at most 31% are welfarist. [Survey Insturments] 

Abstract: Many institutions depend on reasoned discourse to reach decisions, but the degree to which debates are publicly observable varies. We examine reasoned discourse in the U.S. Senate, and study how increasing transparency through the introduction of C-SPAN changed legislative discourse. We find that the introduction of C-SPAN encouraged members to herd with co-partisans and to anti-herd with cross-partisans; it also appears to have led to the restructuring of Senate time to facilitate performative speech. Suggesting the information problems and career incentives at play, these effects are strongest for those closest to an election and for those with less sophisticated constituencies.

Abstract: Scholars increasingly use machine learning techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to reduce the dimensionality of textual data and to study discourse in collective bodies. However, measures of discourse based on algorithmic results typically have no intuitive meaning or obvious relationship to humanly observed discourse. Such measures of discourse must be carefully validated before relied on and interpreted. We examine several common measures of discourse based on algorithmic results, and propose a number of ways to validate them in the setting of Federal Open Market Committee meetings. We also suggest that validation techniques may be used as a principled approach to model selection and parameterization.

Abstract: Videoconferencing has recently become ubiquitous due to the COVID-19 pandemic but has been growing in importance for decades. Despite this growth, we have limited understanding of the costs associated with adopting this technology. In this paper I leverage a novel dataset tracking 1.7 million individuals attending 1.2 million videoconference meetings over 6 months to evaluate individual punctuality in the remote workplace. I find that participants spend a significant amount of time waiting for others to arrive. An average meeting causes 6 minutes of per participant waiting time and even small meetings (≤ 5 participants) waste 14 minutes of total participant time. I investigate the predictors of these coordination failures and find that punctuality is best (and waiting time is minimized) for smaller, shorter meetings scheduled on the hour and half hour. I find some evidence for the development of norms that lead to relatively lower coordination failures than the distributions of arrival times might suggest and discuss the implications of these findings to a time of many new users of this technology.