Research on crime in the late 20th century has consistently shown that immigrants have lower rates of involvement in criminal activity than natives. We find that a century ago immigrants may have been slightly more likely than natives to be involved in crime. In 1904 prison commitment rates for...

The perception that immigration adversely affects crime rates led to legislation in the 1990s that particularly increased punishment of criminal aliens. In fact, immigrants have much lower institutionalization (incarceration) rates than the native born - on the order of one-fifth the rate of...

Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violent crime in cities and have relied on data with serious limitations regarding nativity information. We analyze administrative data from Pennsylvania prisons,...

Although a substantial body of research suggests that the discretion of discretion of actors in the criminal justice system is important, there is disagreement in the existing empirical literature over its role. Studies in this literature generally hypothesize that discretion plays one of two...

This paper explores price formation when sellers are privately informed both about their preferences and the quality of their asset. In equilibrium, sellers recognize that it will be harder to sell their asset at higher prices, while buyers recognize that they will get higher quality assets on...

We study the optimal design of unemployment insurance for workers sampling job opportunities over time. We focus on the timing of benefits and the desirability of allowing workers to freely access a riskless asset. When workers have constant absolute risk aversion preferences, a very simple...

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of asset markets affected by adverse selection. There exists a unique equilibrium where better assets trade at higher prices but in less liquid markets. Sellers of high-quality assets can separate because they are more willing to accept a lower trading...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in macro models with heterogeneity in information and complementarity in actions. These models deliver promising positive properties, such as heightened inertia and volatility. But they also raise important normative questions, such as whether...

This paper studies policy in a class of economies in which information about commonly-relevant fundamentals -- such as aggregate productivity and demand conditions -- is dispersed and can not be centralized by the government. In these economies, the decentralized use of information can fail to...

This paper shows how rational investors can have different degrees of optimism regarding the prospects of the economy, even if they share exactly the same information regarding all economic fundamentals. The key is that heterogeneity in expectations regarding endogenous outcomes can emerge as a...