How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024. We leverage two shocks to colocation: (i) the office closures in 2020 and (ii) the subsequent return-to-office mandates. In both cases, co-located teams experienced bigger changes in proximity than distributed ones, facilitating difference-in-differences designs. We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues. In national US data, we find suggestive evidence that the rise of remote work has had scarring effects on young college graduates: in remotable jobs, their unemployment rate has remained elevated relative to older graduates’, a pattern not seen in non-remotable jobs.

How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We decompose these effects in a Fortune 500 firm. Before Covid-19, remote workers answered 12% fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. After the offices closed, the productivity gap narrowed by 4%, and formerly on-site workers’ call quality and promotion rates declined. Even with everyone remote, an 8% productivity gap persisted, indicating negative selection into remote jobs. A cost-benefit analysis indicates that savings in reduced turnover and office rents could outweigh remote work's negative productivity impact but not the costs of attracting less productive workers.

In criminal cases, prosecutors can adjust police officers' charges before sentencing --- and so can offset racial disparities introduced by the police. Yet previous research suggests that prosecutors instead compound earlier disparities. We investigate prosecutors' impacts on disparities using discontinuities in North Carolina's sentencing laws, where defendants with marginally longer criminal histories qualify for mandatory-prison sentences. Prosecutors can sidestep mandatory prison by reducing qualifying defendants' arrest charges.  Between 1995 and 2019, Black defendants were initially less likely --- but ultimately became more likely --- to benefit from charge reductions to avoid mandatory prison. The reversal is driven entirely by arrests typically initiated by police.

Incarceration is often justified by a defendant’s risk of future crime. To what extent do errors in predicting crime distort incarceration decisions?  We survey prosecutors about how violent re-arrest rates vary by defendant age and criminal history. Surveyed prosecutors make systematic errors: they underestimate the decline in re-arrest with age and overestimate the increase with criminal history. By linking prosecutors’ beliefs to their quasi-randomly assigned cases, we show that prosecutors' beliefs predict the incarceration patterns by defendant age and criminal history in their cases. Finally, we find that prosecutors with more accurate beliefs simultaneously reduce violent re-arrest and incarceration.

When women become mothers, they often take a step back from their careers. Could work from home (WFH) reduce this motherhood penalty, particularly in traditionally family-unfriendly careers? We leverage technological changes prior to the pandemic that increased the feasibility of WFH in some college degrees but not others. In degrees where WFH increased, motherhood gaps in employment narrowed: for every 10% increase in WFH, mothers' employment rates increased by 0.78 percentage points (or 0.94%) relative to other women's. This change is driven by majors linked to careers that have high returns to hours and inflexible demands on workers' time. We microfound these results using panel data that show that women who could WFH before childbirth are less likely to exit the workforce. 

What are the returns to firms of paying more? We study a Fortune 500 firm’s voluntary firm-wide $15/hour minimum wage, which affected some warehouses more than others. Using a continuous difference-in-differences design, we find that a $1/hour pay increase (5.5%), halves worker departures, reduces absenteeism by 18.6%, and increases productivity (boxes moved per hour) by 5.7%. These productivity gains fully defrayed increased labor costs, offsetting the firm’s incentive to markdown wages. We develop a simple model that connects efficiency-wage incentives and monopsony power, showing how these forces can counterbalance each other to keep wages closer to workers’ marginal revenues.

Decision-makers often fail to correct for others’ biases. We study this dynamic in the criminal justice system, where prosecutors rely on police for information about arrests but recently began receiving more objective information from body-worn cameras (BWCs). Using BWCs’ staggered rollout in North Carolina, we find BWCs reduce incarceration disparities by 14% --- only one-sixth of which is explained by reductions in arrests. To unpack mechanisms, we link an original survey of 203 prosecutors to their half-million cases. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a quarter of the incarceration result reflects learning: prosecutors with more BWC exposure view police as less reliable and more biased.

Prosecutors serve as gatekeepers between arrest and sentencing, giving them significant influence over how racial disparities evolve through the criminal justice system. How much do prosecutors vary in their impacts on these disparities? Using the quasi-random assignment of cases within North Carolina prosecutor offices, we estimate individual prosecutors’ effects on racial disparities in incarceration. Prosecutors vary substantially: a prosecutor one standard deviation below the mean reduces disparities by 1.3 percentage points — roughly 40% of the unconditional race gap. Black and Democratic prosecutors reduce disparities on average, but most variation exists within racial and political groups, pointing to other important drivers of heterogeneity.

Women are underrepresented in highly-paid "greedy jobs" that demand long and unpredictable hours (Goldin, 2014). Could flexibility over where work is performed narrow gender gaps in employment in greedy jobs? Our evidence suggests yes: women view working from home (WFH) as a more important complement to long hours than men do. Revisiting hypothetical-choice data from Maestas et al. (2023), we find that the gender gap in preferences for WFH is entirely driven by people working more than 40 hours per week. Among those in these long-hour jobs, women are willing to forego 15.9% of their pay for WFH, compared to just 2.4% for men. We further find that women are more likely to choose longer-hour jobs when those jobs allow them to WFH, using both Maestas et al. data and our own original surveys.

One in five Americans bears the mark of a criminal record as they navigate the job-search process. How do the resulting search frictions affect equilibrium wages in low-wage labor markets? We use data from a Fortune 100 staffing agency to calibrate and test a wage-posting model, in which workers with and without records face different search frictions but earn commonly posted wages. We find that workers with records have 17 percent less elastic labor supply to each firm, suggesting that firms can post lower wages in labor markets where more workers have records. When the same job is offered by a firm in multiple locations, we find that the firm's posted wage tends to be lower in places where the share of workers with criminal records in that specific occupation is higher. This pattern holds equally for workers with and without records. These equilibrium consequences suggest that the increase in records in the past few decades has reduced earnings of all low-wage workers by 1.2-1.5 percent or about $400 per year.