• 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 parole supervision in Illinois. The reform reduced the term of supervision for some parolees from 12 months to 6 months while many similar parolees continued to receive 12 months of supervision. We evaluate the impact of the reform using a standard difference-in-differences estimator, and we find clear evidence that the reform reduced prison re-entry rates. Sharp drops in rates of technical revocations drove these reductions. Rates of prison re-admissions linked to new crimes did not change. We merge data from Cook County Courts with our data on state prison admissions and releases, and we find no evidence that the reform increased crime rates among parolees. The reform reduced both the cost of incarceration and the cost of parolee supervision without creating harms to public safety.