Research

Job Market Paper

Does Distance from Home Matter in Prison? Effects on Visitation and Recidivism

This paper studies how the distance between prison and an incarcerated individual’s home affects their likelihood of recidivism. Leveraging a unique dataset covering more than 20,000 incarcerated individuals and over 200,000 prison visits, I exploit quasi-random variation in home-to-prison distance generated by facility assignment rules. I find that a 100-mile increase in placement distance raises prison readmission within 3 years by 3.5 percent. This effect is driven by a reduction in visitation, with individuals placed farther from home being significantly less likely to receive visits. While social support is theorized to reduce recidivism, there is limited causal evidence on how maintaining these connections during incarceration affects recidivism. To address this, I use distance as an instrument for visitation, and find that visitation lowers the likelihood of re-incarceration by about 8 percentage points within one year and 10 percentage points within three years. Additionally, I show that visitation also shortens the fraction of time served by nearly 4 percentage points and reduces housing instability by 16 percentage points, the former consistent with a reduction in misconduct and the latter an important mechanism for successful post-release outcomes. Counterfactual estimates suggest assigning individuals closer to home could reduce recidivism by an additional 2 to 4 percent.

Current Projects

An evaluation of Crisis-Intervention Team (CIT) training (working paper, RePEC 2022)

Police officers in the United States are most often the first responders to a mental health crisis. The most popular training method for police officers response to mental health crises among US police departments is crisis-intervention team (CIT) training. This paper provides the first estimates of the causal effect of CIT training on a police officer’s propensity to use force and make an arrest. I implement a difference-in-differences framework using future trainees as controls to compare officer use of force and arrest of trained officers to those of untrained officers. I do not find a statistically significant effect of CIT training on either use of force or propensity to arrest.

Prison Diversion for Parents (Arnold Ventures Research Grant, PI)

Pre-PhD Publications

The Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States with Michael Batty, Jesse Bricker, Joseph Briggs, Sarah Friedman, Eric Nielsen, Kamila Sommer and Alice Henriques Volz (Chapter in NBER Books Series Studies in Income and Wealth 2020)

This paper describes the construction of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA), a dataset containing quarterly estimates of the distribution of US household wealth since 1989. The DFA builds on two existing Federal Reserve Board statistical products—quarterly aggregate measures of household wealth from the Financial Accounts of the United States, and triennial wealth distribution measures from the Survey of Consumer Finances—to incorporate distributional information into a national accounting framework. The DFA complements other sources by generating distributional statistics that are consistent with macro aggregates by providing quarterly data on a timely basis, and by constructing wealth distributions across demographic characteristics. We encourage policymakers, researchers, and other interested parties to use the DFA to better understand issues related to the distribution of US household wealth.

The Stability of Safe Asset Production with Sara Almasani, Michael Batty, and Wayne Passmore (FEDS Note 2020)