Truth-in-Sentencing, Incentives and Recidivism, The Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming (Working Paper)
Media: Probable Causation podcast, Route Fifty
Punishing Financial Crimes: The Impact of Prison on Defendants and Their Colleagues w/ Kristiina Huttunen, Martti Kaila and Emily Nix, AEJ: Economic Policy, forthcoming (Working Paper)
The Impacts of Romantic Relationships with the Boss w/ Jerry Motonen & Emily Nix, Submitted
Romantic relationships in the workplace are common, but those between managers and subordinates have increasingly drawn scrutiny. Using administrative data on the universe of cohabiting couples in Finland, we examine the career implications of starting or ending a personal relationship with a workplace manager and the spillovers of these relationships on the broader workforce. An event study design reveals that entering a relationship with a manager increases the subordinate's earnings by 6%, but breaking up triggers an abrupt 18% earnings decline. We also find that these relationships generate spillovers: retention of other workers declines by six percentage points, with effects concentrated in workplaces where subordinates experience greater earnings gains. Our findings highlight both the private benefits and organizational costs of hierarchical workplace relationships.
Media: The Economist, CBC Radio, La Presse, Investopedia, Fortune, Weekendavisen
The Missing Middle: The Disparate Impact of Post-Release Supervision on Returns to Prison and Reconviction w/ Abigail Banan
In 2011, North Carolina expanded post-release supervision to 80% of felony releases that previously went unsupervised. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that 25% of those newly supervised were returned to prison via revocation. This nearly doubled the reincarceration rate one year after release, which remained 3% higher after three years. These revocation effects were racially disparate: Black supervisees were 40% more likely to be revoked, resulting in 55% more days incarcerated 3 years after initial release. Black supervisees experienced a short-term decline in the new felony conviction rate, consistent with incapacitation. Conversely, the felony conviction rate decreased after 12 months for White supervisees, who were 22% less likely to have a felony reconviction after 3 years. This was offset by a steady increase in the new misdemeanor rate, yielding no net change in the overall reconviction rate. Evidence suggests these effects may have been the result of the discretionary downgrading of new charges for White supervisees.
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), I am 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.
The Impacts of Fines on Criminal Reoffending of Low Income Defendants w/ Martti Kaila and Emily Nix