Research

WORKING PAPERS

Humans in the Loop: The Blind Spot of the Credibility Revolution (with Joshua B. Fishman, date of most recent draft: January 2025. Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Economic Literature)

Revisiting the Lasting Impacts of Incarceration, (with John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Winnie van Dijk; under review, date of most recent draft: June 2025)

PUBLICATIONS (ECONOMICS JOURNALS) 

Conviction, Incarceration and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door, Accepted at Quarterly Journal of Economics (with John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Kamelia Stavreva, Winnie van Dijk; date of most recent draft: January 2025) 

The Importance of Base-Rates in Differential Impact: A Bail Reform Case-Study, 108 Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 139, 2025 (with Aurelie Ouss)

Algorithmic Risk Assessment in The Hands of Humans, 16 AEJ: Economic Policy 382, 2024 (with Jennifer Doleac) 

Does Cash Bail Deter Misconduct? 15 AEJ: Applied Economics 150, 2023 (with Aurelie Ouss) (journal) (non-paywalled version)

Algorithmic Social Engineering, 110 American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings 96, 2020 (with Bo Cowgill) 

Distortion of Justice: How the Inability to Pay Bail Affects Case Outcomes, 34 Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 511, 2018 

·       Winner, 2019 Oliver E. Williamson Award for best article, selected from all JLEO articles published within the preceding three years      

Breaking Bad: Mechanisms of Social Influence and the Path to Criminality in Juvenile Jails, 99 Review of Economics and Statistics 824, 2017 

PUBLICATIONS (LAW REVIEWS) 

Eugenic Criminology and the Origins of Predictive Algorithms in Criminal Justice (forthcoming, University of Illinois Law Review, with Robynn Cox; date of most recent draft: April 2025)

The Robots Aren’t Taking over yet: a Criminal Justice Field Experiment (forthcoming, American Criminal Law Review, with David Abrams, Brian Collopy, Aurelie Ouss and Colin Sullivan; date of most recent draft: January 2025)

Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World, 103 Boston University Law Review 2001, 2024 

Systemic Failures to Appear in Court, 172 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1, 2023 (with Lindsay Graef, Sandra Mayson, Aurelie Ouss) 

The Counterintuitive Consequences of Sex Offender Risk Assessment at Sentencing, 73 University of Toronto Law Journal 59, 2023 (invited symposium essay; with Jennifer L. Doleac) 

Pretrial Detention and the Value of Liberty, 108 Virginia Law Review 709, 2022 (with Sandy Mayson) 

Misdemeanors By the Numbers 61 Boston College Law Review 971, 2020 (with Sandra Mayson) 

Algorithmic Risk Assessment and the Double-Edged Sword of Youth 96 Washington University Law Review 681, 2018 (with Christopher Slobogin; re-issued in Behavioral Sciences & Law special edition on risk assessment) 

Assessing Risk Assessment in Action, 103 Minnesota Law Review 303, 2018 

·       Winner, 2017 Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition, Federalist Society

The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice, 98 Boston University Law Review 731, 2018 (with Sandra Mayson) 

The Downstream Consequences of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, 69 Stanford Law Review 711, 2017 (with Paul Heaton and Sandra Mayson) 

OTHER WRITING

Average Monotonicity in a Setting with Covariates, (August 2023, Note) 

Choosing Freedom, Inquest, August 2021 (with Sandy Mayson, Andrea Roth, Jane Bambauer) 

Open Risk Assessment, 38 Behavioral Sciences and Law 279, 2020 (with Brandon L. Garrett) 

Question your Algorithms: Joint response to “What is ‘Fair’? Algorithms in Criminal Justice” 34 Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2018

Pretrial Risk Assessment: A Practice Guide for Judges, 57 ABA Judges Journal, Summer 2018 (with David G. Robinson and Hannah Jane Sassaman)

Are Criminal Risk Assessment Scores Racist?, Brookings Institution, Aug. 22, 2016 (with Jennifer Doleac)

A Decomposition of Racial Disparities in Pretrial Detention (Permanent working paper; date of most recent draft: Jan. 27, 2018)

Pretrial Detention and Bail, Academy For Justice, A Report on Scholarship and Criminal Justice Reform (Erik Luna ed., 2017) 

Tests of Random Assignment to Peers in the Face of Mechanical Negative Correlation: An Evaluation of Four Techniques (Permanent working paper; date of most recent draft: Aug. 9, 2015)

Green Industrial Policy: Trade and Theory, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (2012, with Larry Karp) 

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Institutes for Defective Delinquents (with Thomas Frampton)

Credit, Conviction and Incarceration (with John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Winnie van Dijk)

Crime in Prison (with Emma Harrington, Aurelie Ouss, and Hannah Schaffer)

Incarceration and Family Dynamics (with John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Winnie van Dijk)