The increasing availability of large administrative datasets has led to a particularly exciting innovation in criminal justice research, that of the "low-cost" randomized trial in which administrative data are used to measure outcomes in lieu of costly primary data collection. In this paper, we...

This paper offers experimental evidence that crime can be successfully reduced by changing the situational environment that potential victims and offenders face. We focus on a ubiquitous but surprisingly understudied feature of the urban landscape - street lighting - and report the first...

For every crime there is a victim. However nearly all studies in the economics of crime have focused the causal determinants of criminality. We present novel evidence on the causal determinants of victimization, focusing on legal access to alcohol. The social costs of alcohol use and abuse are...

Aiming to reduce the gender wage gap, several states and cities have recently adopted legislation that prohibits employers from asking about previously earned salaries. The advocates of these salary history bans (SHBs) have suggested pay history perpetuates past discrimination. We study the...

Tobacco 21 (T-21) laws prohibit the sale of tobacco products to individuals under age 21. This study is the first to comprehensively examine the impacts of statewide T-21 laws on youth tobacco consumption, including spillovers to minor teens. Using data from the 2009-2019 Behavioral Risk Factor...

We report the first empirical estimate of the race-specific effects of larger police forces in the United States. Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus white victims. At the same time, larger police...

We quantify the effects of a gross receipts tax (GRT) on vertical integration for the first time. We use data from the Washington state recreational cannabis industry, which has numerous advantages including a clean natural experiment: a 25% GRT imposed on cannabis firms was subsequently...