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.

How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024. Our difference-in-differences designs leverage the fact that both the office closures and return-to-office mandates affected co-located teams more than distributed ones. 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. National trends are consistent with remote work scarring young workers.

Would surveilling the police reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system? Using the staggered roll-out of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) in North Carolina, we find that BWCs reduce arrest rates for Black people --- but not for white people.  These effects on arrests are concentrated in low-level crimes that almost never lead to incarceration, and therefore, could not, on their own, generate large changes in incarceration. Nonetheless, we find that BWCs reduce incarceration rates for Black people by 11%. To unpack these downstream effects, we fielded an original survey of North Carolina prosecutors. We find that prosecutors who report questioning police reports more frequently reduce incarceration disparities relative to others in the same office and unit. Yet prosecutors' skepticism of police reports stops mattering once BWCs have been adopted, suggesting that surveillance is a substitute for skepticism. Finally, we find evidence that prosecutors with more exposure to BWCs believe that police are less reliable, and arrests are more racially biased, suggesting that BWCs reveal a different reality than the one originally presented by the police.

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.

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. 

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.