We examine the relationship between neighborhood poverty rates and juvenile criminal behavior using data from a unique randomized housing-mobility experiment. We find that providing families with the opportunity to move from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods has substantial effects on the...

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are an increasingly common tool for police oversight, accountability, and transparency, yet there remains uncertainty about their impacts on policing outcomes. This paper reviews what we know about the benefits of BWCs and how those benefits compare to the costs of this...

Sometimes a survey is well designed, but the resulting estimates are demonstrably wrong, and by a wide margin. For that reason, we believe that if getting a reasonably accurate estimate is important (and if it is not, why bother?), then the analyst should ask and attempt to answer the following...

The pattern of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City since the introduction of "broken windows" policing in 1994 is remarkable. By the year 2000, arrests on misdemeanor charges of smoking marijuana in public view (MPV) had reached 51,267 for the city, up 2,670 percent from 1,851 arrests...

Government restrictions on entry are endemic in telecommunications, even where there are no obvious reasons for them, as is the case in mobile telecommunications. This may in part be because policy makers genuinely do not understand the benefits competition will bring. By using the natural...

In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling suggested in an influential article in the Atlantic Monthly that targeting minor disorder could help reduce more serious crime. More than 20 years later, the three most populous cities in the U.S. - New York, Chicago and, most recently, Los Angeles -...

While hypothesis testing is a highly formalized activity, hypothesis generation remains largely informal. We propose a procedure that uses machine learning algorithms—and their capacity to notice patterns that people might not—to generate novel hypotheses about human behavior. We illustrate...

Whether government transfer programs increase the human capital of low-income children is a question of first-order policy importance. Such policies might help poor children if their parents are credit constrained, and so under-invest in their human capital. But it is also possible that whatever...

**Below is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract.** Ethnographic research and media reports suggest that many African-American students view academic achievement as a form of "acting white" and that peer pressure leads to reduced effort and performance. This paper uses data from...

This paper tests the specification of the typical (and a few atypical) models for estimating the relationship between educational resources and student achievement, using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Using specification tests which do not rely upon the existence...