The United States government devotes about $40 billion each year to means-tested housing programs, plus another $6 billion or so in tax expenditures on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). What exactly do we spend this money on, why, and what does it accomplish? We focus on these...

Since Brooklyn Heights was designated as New York City's first landmarked neighborhood in 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated 120 historic neighborhoods in the city. This paper develops a theory of heterogeneous impacts across neighborhoods and exploits variation in the...

The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new evidence about the consequences of gentrification on mobility, building and neighborhood conditions,...

We examine how machine learning can be used to improve and understand human decision-making. In particular, we focus on a decision that has important policy consequences. Millions of times each year, judges must decide where defendants will await trial—at home or in jail. By law, this decision...

The law forbids discrimination. But the ambiguity of human decision-making often makes it extraordinarily hard for the legal system to know whether anyone has actually discriminated. To understand how algorithms affect discrimination, we must therefore also understand how they affect the problem...

This paper is the introductory chapter for the forthcoming NBER volume Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs. The Great Recession has led to cuts in criminal justice expenditures, and the trend towards ever-higher incarceration rates that has been underway since the 1970s in the U.S....

Head Start is a federal early childhood intervention designed to reduce disparities in preschool outcomes. The first randomized experimental study of Head Start, the National Head Start Impact Study (NHSIS), found impacts on academic outcomes of .15 to .3 standard deviations measured at the end...

In this paper we estimate the causal effects on child mortality from moving into less distressed neighborhood environments. We match mortality data to information on every child in public housing that applied for a housing voucher in Chicago in 1997 (N=11,848). Families were randomly assigned to...

Randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies. How can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes? We argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions,...

The "core right" established in D.C. vs. Heller (2008) is to keep an operable handgun in the home for self-defense purposes. If the Court extends this right to cover state and local jurisdictions, the result is likely to include the elimination of the most stringent existing regulations - such...