Mortgage capital remains key to accessing the best neighborhoods and public services, as well as building wealth among lower-income Americans; yet we know little about how increasing diversity impacts mortgage outcomes. For the top 100 metropolitan areas, pre and post-recession mortgage...

Settlement is a term rarely used in criminal law. Instead, people speak almost exclusively of plea bargaining — i.e., agreements in which a defendant promises to plead guilty in exchange for a prosecutor's promise to seek leniency in charging or sentencing. But a traditional plea agreement is...

In recent decades, sex offenders have been the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law...

Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge in legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws' effects, in part because the...

In recent years, scholars and policymakers have devoted considerable attention to the potential consequences of employment noncompetition agreements and to whether legislatures ought to reform the laws that govern the enforcement of these controversial contractual provisions. Unfortunately, much...

Using nationally representative survey data on 11,505 labor force participants in 2014, we examine the use, implementation, and labor market outcomes associated with noncompete agreements. Nearly 1 in 5 labor force participants are bound by noncompetes, and nearly 40% have agreed to at least one...

This paper presents the first systematic theoretical and empirical study of high-low agreements in civil litigation. A high-low agreement is a private contract that, if signed by litigants before the conclusion of a trial, constrains any plaintiff recovery to a specified range. Whereas existing...

The purported purpose of sex offender post-release regulations (e.g., community notification and residency restrictions) is the reduction of sex offender recidivism. On their face, these laws seem well-designed and likely to be effective. A simple economic framework of offender behavior can be...

The need for prospective beneficiaries to “take up” new programs is a common stumbling block for otherwise well-designed legal and policy innovations. I examine the take-up problem in the context of publicly provided court services and test the effectiveness of various outreach strategies...

Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law...