Science makes progress with rational debate, disagreement, and discussion. In that vein, I am grateful to the authors of the comment, Steven Durlauf and James Heckman, for engaging in one of the most important social issues of our time. Their comment can be synthesized into three points. First, Durlauf and Heckman (2020) believe that we make claims about discrimination, or the absence thereof, when no such conclusions using a direct regression approach are justified. Second, they describe issues with the endogeneity of police-civilian contacts and suggest modeling those interactions. And, third, they express skepticism of any analysis that relies on police narratives regarding interactions with civilians. Below, I respond to each of these in turn. Here is a brief summary. I disagree with their first point—we went through painstaking effort to belabor what our analysis can and cannot teach us about race and policing. Weuse the term “racial differences”114 times in lieuof themoreprescriptive wording—“racial discrimination.”Weuse the phrase “conditional on an interaction” 20 times throughout the paper and explicitly note at the outset—in the fifth paragraph—that if we do not use this phrase, it is implied. I am not sure howmanymore ways we would have needed to caveat our results to satisfy the authors. I agree with their second point, theoretically—that is why the section immediately following the data description is titled “A Note on Potential Selection into Police Data Sets”—but I am perplexed as to why they claim that our sample is “based on ‘stops.’” The truth is that the vast majority of the data they are referring to are gleaned from 911 calls for service in which a civilian requests police presence, not from police lurking to harass civilians. I agree that police shootings that begin with police stopping a civilian and that interaction escalating and becoming deadly are deeply

This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On nonlethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than 50 percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences either in the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of whom have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

Using survey data from the Promise Academy in the Harlem Children’s Zone, we estimate the effects of high-performing charter schools on human capital, risky behaviors, and health outcomes. Six years after the random admissions lottery, youths offered admission to the Promise Academy middle school score 0.279 (0.073) standard deviations higher on academic achievement outcomes, 0.067 (0.076) standard deviations higher on an index of academic attainment, and 0.313 (0.091) standard deviations higher on a measure of on-time benchmarks. Females are 10.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant as teenagers, and males are 4.4 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated.

This paper explores the economics of diversity-enhancing policies. A model is proposed in which heterogeneous agents, distinguished by skill level and social identity, purchase productive opportunities in a competitive market. We analyze policies designed to raise the status of a disadvantaged identity group. When agent identity is contractible, efficient policy grants preferred access to slots but offers no direct assistance for acquiring skills. When identity is not contractible, efficient policy provides universal subsidies to skill development when the fraction of the disadvantaged group at the skill development margin is larger than their share at the slot assignment margin.