Working Papers
Working Papers
Consumer Choice in Illinois Prison Commissaries (Job Market Paper)
I create a novel dataset containing monthly sales information from the commissaries of every state prison in Illinois. I estimate a structural model of demand for items sold in the commissary, the only formal avenue through which prisoners can purchase items for consumption. Currently, the Department of Corrections prices commissary goods by setting a uniform 25% markup on the price paid to the wholesale supplier that provided the good. Leveraging my estimation of the demand system, I find the set of per-good markups that maximizes prisoners' welfare subject to revenue neutrality and other alternative constraints. I find that, under restrictions on the parameters of the model suggested by demand theory, only quite modest increases in welfare, equivalent to an increase of $0.15 in prisoners' monthly budgets, are possible while maintaining revenue neutrality. In the absence of those parameter restrictions, gains may climb as high as $3.32 per prisoner per month, a significant increase for consumers with average monthly budgets of about $125. I additionally find that significantly reducing prisons' revenue goals, by eliminating the 60% of the markup that is channeled outside of the prison economy, produces an increase in welfare equivalent to a budget increase of $17.36. As a portion of this increase is a simple consequence of sacrificing revenue in order to lower prices, I benchmark the counterfactual prices against uniform reductions in prices and lump-sum payments to prisoners.
Tenure Effects in Police Investigatory Stops, with Andrew Jordan (R&R at Economic Inquiry)
We use data from Chicago to study how search and hit rates in pedestrian stops change with officer tenure. Search rates and hit rates both decline over officers' careers. This is inconsistent with both simple screening models and variation across other officer characteristics. We propose a model that explains this pattern by allowing officers to make dynamic investments in search skill. Officers make minimal investments because they anticipate patrolling lower-crime areas as they accumulate tenure.
The Impacts of Parole Supervision, with Andrew Jordan and Derek Neal
We study the impacts of a reform to post-release supervision in IL. The reform reduced the term of post-release supervision among lower-level offenders from 12 months to 6 months. We find little to no evidence that this reform increased rates of return to prison associated with new crimes. However, the reform reduced the 12-month rate of prison re-entries associated with technical revocations by roughly nine percentage points, which is more than 45 percent of the pre-reform baseline rate. We find similar results using differences-in-differences models, simple pre-post regressions, and competing risks models.
How (Much) Do Financial Repercussions Affect Pre-trial Behavior? The Treatment Effect of Cash Bail in Cook County
I exploit a policy change that affected the size of refunds expected by Illinois defendants who fulfilled the terms of their bail agreements to examine whether the amount of cash bail affects defendants' likelihoods of committing bail violations. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I find modest effects concentrated in the center of the bail amount distribution.