Current Research Notes

I often receive feedback faster than I can fully integrate it into my working papers. This page is devoted to an informal presentation of responses to feedback and ongoing revisions, prior to integration into the next working draft.

Paper: Undocumented Immigration & Crime in the United States: A Micro-Level Analysis

Note: I'm grateful for continued feedback on this paper and would like to take the opportunity to address a frequent interpretational concern raised. In the paper, I argue that the increase in Hispanic arrest rates reflects rising migrant crime, but the data, at face value, does not rule out the possibility that it reflects increased victimizations among this demographic. Since I restrict attention to Hispanic arrest rates, this would only be the case if native-born Hispanics were offending against the newly arrived Hispanic migrants. One way to rule out this potential channel is to incrementally restrict the estimation sample  in five percentile intervals to modified zip codes with a lower Hispanic share. The figure displays DiD estimates from this procedure, as the sample is restricted from right to left toward modified zip codes with a lower Hispanic share. The post-treatment effect (in red) persists regardless of native Hispanic representation, which is  inconsistent with a victimization channel. 

Acknowledgment: I thank Giovanni Mastrobuoni (Turin) for suggesting this robustness exercise.