Ph.D Student in Economics -Computational Justice League - Claremont Graduate University

Research Projects

Publications

Police Force Diversity and Policing Quality: A Replication and Extension of Previous

International Review of Law and Economics, Forthcoming, (2019) (with A. Harvey and H. Johnson)

This paper examines whether court-imposed affirmative action plans have impacted the rates of reported offenses and/or offenses cleared by arrest, seeking to replicate and extend Lott [2000] and McCrary [2007]. For this analysis we use a series of econometric strategies, including difference-in-differences decomposition, duration models with interactive fixed effects and generalized synthetic controls.

Working Papers

The Effect Of Not Prosecuting Drug Offenses On Overdose Deaths: Evidence From A Natural Experiment

Recent elections have resulted in prosecutors that have vowed to stop prosecution of low-level, non-violent offenses. The effects or not prosecuting these offences are unknown and there are many confounding effects when trying to use the actions of elected officials to find the true causal effect on not prosecuting. This paper uses an unforeseen incident at the San Francisco Drug lab that restricts prosecutor power to determine the causal effects of not prosecuting drug offenses on drug arrests made by law enforcement officers, and on overdose deaths.

Lost Jobs, Lost Lives: The Effects of Unemployment Shocks and Gun Laws on Suicides (with U.Le and G.DeAngelo)

Unemployment is linked to over 45,000 annual suicides worldwide; accounting for about a 20% of all suicides. In this paper we use changes in international trade between the United States and other countries, and its impact on small contained economies within a commuting zone as an instrument for employment. We use this instrument to establish the causal pathway between unemployment and suicides. We then determine whether or not stricter gun laws mitigate the effect of unemployment on suicide.