Research

Working Papers 

Truth-in-Sentencing, Incentives and Recidivism Revised and resubmitted to Review of Economics and Statistics

Truth in Sentencing (TIS) laws eliminate the use of discretion in the decision to release inmates from prison. This sharply decreases the incentive for good behaviour and rehabilitative effort among prisoners. In this paper, I use a regression discontinuity (RD)design to exploit a sharp cutoff in these incentives created by the introduction of TIS inArizona. I show that judges reduced sentences by 16%, resulting in no change in time served, allowing parole incentives to be isolated as the mechanism of interest. I find that rule infractions increased by 35% to 60%, while education program enrolment fell by 14%. Further, I find offenders were 5.4 percentage points more likely to return to prison after release. I further explore heterogeneity and find that serious offenders were the most impacted. I show that violent offenders saw the largest decrease in education program enrolment and an increase of up to 100% in violent infractions.

Media: Probable Causation podcast, Route Fifty 

Financial Crime and Punishment w/ Kristiina Huttunen, Martti Kaila and Emily Nix  Revise and resubmitted at AEJ: Economic Policy

We show that financial crimes are committed by very different people compared with other crimes, have increased as a share of total crimes, but defendants receive lighter punishments. Given these stylized facts, we investigate whether harsher sanctions reduce financial crimes. Using random assignment of judges to identify causal impacts of prison sentences, we show that prison reduces recidivism by 43.2 percentage points in the three years following the crime. We also find that individuals quasi-randomly exposed to a colleague who is imprisoned for a financial crime are less likely to commit financial crimes in the future, suggesting important spillover effects.

Dating and Breaking Up with the Boss: Benefits, Costs, and Spillovers w/ Jerry Motonen & Emily Nix Submitted

While many romantic relationships begin at work, intimate relationships between managers and subordinates have increasingly come under scrutiny. We use administrative data covering the universe of cohabiting couples in Finland from 1988-2016 to explore the career implications of dating and breaking up with one's manager and spillovers on the wider workforce. Using a difference-in-difference across-couples research design we find that those in relationships with their managers experience a 9\% bump in their earnings compared to those in relationships with managers in different firms. Relationships between managers and subordinates last longer and both manager and subordinate are more likely to remain in the same firm. However, when a manager and subordinate break up, the subordinate is 10 percentage points more likely to drop out of employment. Last, we examine the spillovers of these relationships on the broader workforce and document a 4 percentage point decrease in retention of other workers from these relationships. This result suggests these relationships impose costs on colleagues, including but not limited to exit from the firm.

Media: Financial Times 

Post-Release Supervision, Returns to Prison and New Convictions w/ Abigail Banan

Supervision of offenders released from prison is a large and growing component of the criminal justice system in the United States. The paper explores the impact supervision has on successful prisoner reentry. I show the introduction of post-release supervision in North Carolina resulted in a 250% increase in returns to prison. This increase is due to 30% of those supervised receiving a release revocation. By 3 years post-release, supervised offenders are still returned to prison 36% more often. This indicates that many who were returned to prison due to a revocation, may not have in the absence of supervision. I further show that supervised offenders were 4 percentage points less likely to have obtained a new conviction 2 years after release, and this gap grows to 6.5 percentage points 5 years after release. This indicates that incapacitation due to release revocations can not fully explain the reduction in convictions.

Can’t Take The HEAT?: Local Crime Effects of Homeless Shelters  

I explore a temporary cold-weather homeless shelter program in Vancouver, BC, Canada in operation during the winters of 2008 through 2013. Constraints faced in setting up these shelters created plausible exogenous variation in shelter location choice within targeted neighbourhoods. Using data on reported property crimes collected by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), we are able to exploit this variation. These data include the month, year and precise location for each incidence of 6 different types of property crime. Using the fineness of the geography in the data coupled with the exogenous variation in shelter location choice we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effect of these shelters on crime. We find that in the month a shelter opens there is no increase in reported crime on the block a shelter is located and in latter months there is a 120% increase in crime. There is little evidence these impacts extend beyond a shelter’s immediate block.

Works in Progress