Homelessness is part of the lives of many people. But almost no one is homeless for all or most of his or her life. The median shelter homeless spell is well under a month, and even "chronic homelessness" officially entails spells of a year or so. I model homelessness as part of people's lives...

Current rental housing assistance programs are not designed to provide a safety net for people whose lives are volatile, or to encourage poor people to live in good locations. These failings can be corrected. HUD should establish a program of rental insurance-like mortgage insurance, but for...

Witness intimidation is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. It also involves significant strategic complexity and two-sided uncertainty: a criminal cannot know whether his threat will effectively deter a witness from testifying, and a witness cannot know whether the threat will in fact be...

Between 2000 and 2006 the murder rate in Newark doubled while the national rate remained essentially constant. Newark now has eight times as many murders per capita than the nation as a whole. Furthermore, the increase in murders came about through an increase in lethality: total gun discharges...

Scientific views on human variation and the relationship between humans and apes changed dramatically between 1700-1900. This paper traces the history of those changes from an initial consensus on the homogeneity of man and on casual models tied to environmental contrasts to the turn of the 20th...

Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial disparities. African Americans are more likely to be victims, arrestees and prisoners than are members...

Most single adults share housing with other adults, and living alone is considerably more expensive than living with someone else. Yet policies that discourage shared housing for formerly homeless people or people at risk of becoming homeless are common, and those that discourage it are rare....

Turnover falls with tenure ¡ª this is one of the best established empirical regularities of labor economics ¡ª but finding a tenure effect on wages seems to be very hard. Within-job wage cuts do not seem very uncommon either. We reconcile these findings by revisiting an old question: how...

How many adults should live in a house? How do people actually divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In New York City, we find that housing and income maintenance policies exert powerful influences on household...

Studies of homelessness that use city-level observations get systematically different results from studies that use individual-level data. I explain why. The findings are consistent with a model of homelessness as a condition requiring a conjunction of unfortunate circumstances.