Economics PhD candidate at Brown University
The Effects of Prisons on Inmate Misconduct and Later Outcomes
Inmates in the US are assigned to different government-run prisons to serve their sentences and can face highly heterogeneous environments. I study how being assigned to prisons with different levels of inmate misconduct affects their outcomes. Using data from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, I estimate the effects of prisons on inmate misconduct while incarcerated by controlling for a rich set of sentencing and assessment variables used to assign inmates to prisons. I test for bias in my estimates in two ways. First, I show balance across inmate demographics. Second, I leverage inmate transfers between prisons in a “movers” design to demonstrate that misconduct effects accurately reflect causal prison treatment effects. Being assigned to a prison in the highest vs. lowest decile of misconduct effects approximately doubles the inmate’s misconduct, increases additional months in prison by 9%, and increases prison reentry from serious crime by 11%. Overcrowding and the criminality of peers are predictive of misconduct effects. A policy that assigns 20% of new inmates to the prisons that most reduce misconduct can decrease these inmates’ misconduct by up to 40%, time in prison by 4%, and reentry from serious crime by 5%.
Mortality Effects and Choice Across Private Health Insurance Plans (with Jason Abaluck, Peter Hull, and Amanda Starc). The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2021.
The effects on insurance costs of restricting undocumented immigrants’ access to driver licenses (with Kenneth P. Jameson). Southern Economic Journal, 81, no. 4: 907–927.
Estimating Structural Models of Demand with Recentered Instruments (with Kirill Borusyak and Peter Hull).
Killer Ride: Mortality and Cost Implications of Ambulance Ownership (with Joseph Doyle, John Graves, and Jonathan Gruber).