The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action on workforce composition is a 14 percentage point gain in the fraction African American among newly hired officers. Evidence on police performance is mixed. Despite substantial black-white test score differences on police department entrance examinations, city crime rates appear unaffected by litigation. However, litigation lowers slightly both arrests per crime and the fraction black among serious arrestees.

The Effect of Female Education on Fertility and Infant Health: Evidence from School Entry Policies Using Exact Date of Birth

This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. School entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman%u2019s mate and have generally small, but possibly heterogeneous, effects on fertility and infant health. We argue that school entry policies manipulate primarily the education of young women at risk of dropping out of school.

The Deterrence Effect of Prison: Dynamic Theory and Evidence

Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the discontinuous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterrence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2 percent decline in the log-odds of offending at 18, with standard errors ruling out declines of 11 percent or more. We interpret these magnitudes using a stochastic dynamic extension of Becker’s (1968) model of criminal behavior. Calibrating the model to match key empirical moments, we conclude that deterrence elasticities with respect to sentence lengths are no more negative than -0.13 for young offenders.Prison, crime, deterrence, incarceration

Crime, Punishment, and Myopia

Economic theory predicts that increasing the severity of punishments will deter criminal behavior by raising the expected price of committing crime. This implicit price can be substantially raised by making prison sentences longer, but only if offenders' discount rates are relatively low. We use a large sample of felony arrests to measure the deterrence effect of criminal sanctions. We exploit the fact that young offenders are legally treated as adults--and face longer lengths of incarceration--the day they turn 18. Sufficiently patient individuals should therefore significantly lower their offending rates immediately upon turning 18. The small behavioral responses that we estimate suggest that potential offenders are extremely impatient, myopic, or both.

Incomes in South Africa since the fall of Apartheid

This paper examines changes in individual real incomes in South Africa between 1995 and 2000. We document substantial declines—on the order of 40%—in real incomes for both men and women. The brunt of the income decline appears to have been shouldered by the young and the non-White. We argue that changes in respondent attributes are insufficient to explain this decline. For most groups, a (conservative) correction for selection into income recipiency explains some, but not all, of the income decline. For other groups, selection is a potential explanation for the income decline. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation of the evidence is substantial economic restructuring of the South African economy in which wages are not bid up to keep pace with price changes due to a differentially slack labor market.

New Evidence on the Finite Sample Properties of Propensity Score Matching and Reweighting Estimators

Currently available asymptotic results in the literature suggest that matching estimators have higher variance than reweighting estimators. The extant literature comparing the finite sample properties of matching to specific reweighting estimators, however, has concluded that reweighting performs far worse than even the simplest matching estimator. We resolve this puzzle. We show that the findings from the finite sample analyses are not inconsistent with asymptotic analysis, but are very specific to particular choices regarding the implementation of reweighting, and fail to generalize to settings likely to be encountered in actual empirical practice. In the DGPs studied here, reweighting typically outperforms propensity score matching.treatment effects, propensity score, semiparametric efficiency

Incomes in South Africa Since the Fall of Apartheid

This paper examines changes in individual real incomes in South Africa between 1995 and 2000. We document substantial declines--on the order of 40%--in real incomes for both men and women. The brunt of the income decline appears to have been shouldered by the young and the non-white. We argue that changes in respondent attributes are insufficient to explain this decline. For most groups, a (conservative) correction for selection into income recipiency explains some, but not all, of the income decline. For other groups, selection is a potential explanation for the income decline. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation of the evidence is substantial economic restructuring of the South African economy in which wages are not bid up to keep pace with price changes due to a differentially slack labor market.

General Equilibrium Effects of Prison on Crime: Evidence from International Comparisons

We compare crime and incarceration rates over time for the United States, Canada, and England and Wales, as well as for a small selection of comparison countries. Shifts in U.S. punishment policy led to a five-fold increase in the incarceration rate, while nearly every other country experienced only minor increases in incarceration. The large shifts in U.S. punishment policy do not seem to have caused commensurately large improvements in public safety

Do Sexually Violent Predator Laws Violate Double Jeopardy or Substantive Due Process?: An Empirical Inquiry

In 1997, the Supreme Court held that the sexually violent predator (SVP) act in Kansas did not violate double jeopardy or substantive due process even though it indefinitely commits an individual to a locked state-run facility after that individual has completed a maximum prison term. In this article, we question a core empirical foundation for the Court’s holding in Hendricks: that SVPs are so dangerous that they will commit repeat acts of sexual violence if they are not confined. Our findings suggest that SVP laws have had no discernible impact on the incidence of sex crimes. These results challenge the only constitutionally permissible justification for SVP legislation, and they imply that states could more effectively reduce sex crimes by allocating these resources elsewhere. Our argument merits particular attention because we are not asking the Court to reconsider evidence previously presented but deemed insufficient; instead, we are urging the Court to consider evidence that was not yet available when Hendricks was decided