Working Papers
Abstract: Over 3.5 million pedestrians are stopped by police in the United States every year. This paper explores the effectiveness and equity of using pedestrian stops as a crime deterrence tool. Using administrative data from New York City, we test whether pedestrian stops affect neighborhood crime and high school dropout rates and explore the equity of racial disparities in stop rates. Exploiting a 2012 reform that reduced stops by 95%, we compare neighborhoods that have similar crime rates but substantially different stop rates prior to the reform. Treated neighborhoods that experienced twice the reduction in stop rates do not display differential increases in felonies and violent misdemeanors, shootings, or killings over the five years following the reform. Analysis of police surges reveals that when increases in stops are accompanied by increases in police officers, serious crime significantly declines. But alone, heightened stop rates have no measurable impact on serious crime. Comparing students across schools that are differentially exposed to changes in stop rates, we estimate that the reform reduced the probability of high school dropout by 0.36-1.66 percentage points per academic year. By instrumenting for neighborhood stop rates with the reform, we trace out the marginal return curve of stops by race and find that Black and Hispanic residents were stopped at substantially higher rates than would be optimal for crime detection.
“Civic Responses to Police Violence” with Desmond Ang. American Political Science Review, revise and resubmit.
Abstract: Roughly a thousand people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, accounting for more than 5% of all homicides. We estimate the causal impact of these events on civic engagement. Exploiting hyper-local variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to signicant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Blacks and Hispanics and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals. We find corresponding increases in support for criminal justice reforms, suggesting that police violence may cause voters to politically mobilize against perceived injustice. Download: angtebes_civicresponses.pdf
Research In Progress
“Supporting Pathways out of Poverty: Randomized Evaluation of Mobility Mentoring” with Larry Katz and Liz Engle (RCT in the field)
Abstract: Current public support services tend to address a particular symptom of poverty rather than central causes. This paper explores whether holistic, individualized mentoring combined with monetary incentives can help low-income public housing residents achieve economic self-sufficiency. The intervention called Mobility Mentoring includes an individualized coaching plan, weekly meetings to set and assess goals, and temporary financial assistance to incentivize goals or to help participants overcome financial obstacles. We evaluate the intervention through a randomized experiment. With the assistance of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA), we recruited public housing and voucher recipients who are able to work and randomly assign half to treatment. Treatment group participants are able to receive three years of Mobility Mentoring Services, while control group participants receive the services usually available to them in the community. Drawing on administrative tax data, our primary outcomes explore the impact of the program on employment, earnings, and household income. We will also examine impacts on financial health, housing stability, public benefit receipt, and survey measures of health and well-being. We plan to follow study participants for ten years from random assignment in administrative data sources, allowing us to assess whether the intervention generates economic self-sufficiency in the long-run.
“The Effect of Low-level Arrests on the Early-life Trajectory of Urban Youth: Evidence from Administrative Tax Data” with Benny Goldman
“Mental Health, Risk Perceptions, and Aggressive Policing” with William Murdock