I analyze the demand side impacts of a supply side intervention into the market for illegal drugs in what has been described as America's largest open air drug market. Beginning in 2018, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office and the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in an ambitious...

Bride kidnapping is a form of forced marriage in which a woman is taken against her will and coerced into accepting marriage with her captor. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan has seen a large increase in the prominence of this practice alongside a revitalization of traditional values and culture. As part...

This note formalizes the synthetic difference-in-differences estimator for staggered treatment adoption settings, as briefly described in Arkhangelsky et al. (2021). To illustrate the importance of this estimator, I use replication data from Abrams (2012), I compare the estimators obtained using...

Exploiting a novel data set of criminal trials in 19th century London, we evaluate the impact of an accused’s right to counsel on convictions. While lower-level crimes had an established history of professional representation prior to 1836, individuals accused of committing a felony did not,...

We exploit a data set of criminal trials in 19th century London to evaluate the impact of an accused's right to counsel on convictions. While lower-level crimes had an established history of professional representation prior to 1836, individuals accused of committing a felony did not, despite...

We ask what the relationship is between pawn shops and crime. The dominant narrative is that pawn shops reduce the transaction costs of crime and, consequently, promote it. We explore the alternative where pawn shops address the financial distress of those in need, which reduces the incentive to...