Upcoming Papers

• Is Food a Necessity? Prisoners' Choices in Commissary Stores in Illinois (Job Market Paper)

I use sales data from commissary stores operated within Illinois state prisons to examine prisoners' demand functions, with a focus on food items and whether prisoners' diets are dependent on supplementation from the commissary. Employing an Almost Ideal Demand System, I find that prisoners treat high-calorie, high-protein meat items as necessities. I present welfare-improving, revenue-neutral counterfactuals to the Department of Correction's current system of marking up goods sold within the commissary. I also present evidence  that the majority of spending within the commissary is financed by contributions from the outside by prisoners' friends and families, functioning as a highly regressive tax.

• Tenure Effects in Police Investigatory Stops, with Andrew Jordan

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.