We exploit a sudden shock to demand for a subset of low-wage workers generated by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program in San Antonio, Texas, to identify the effects of localized economic development on crime. We use a difference-in-differences methodology that takes advantage of variation in BRAC’s impact over time and across neighborhoods. We find that appropriative criminal behavior increases in neighborhoods where a fraction of residents experienced increases in earnings. This effect is driven by residents who were unlikely to be BRAC beneficiaries, implying that criminal opportunities are important in explaining patterns of crime.

Changes in the treatment of individuals by the criminal justice system following a policy intervention may bias estimates of the effects of the intervention on underlying criminal activity. We explore the importance of such changes in the context of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Using administrative data from San Antonio, Texas, we examine variation across neighborhoods and ethnicities in police arrests and in the rate at which those arrests are prosecuted. We find that changes in police behavior around IRCA confound estimates of the effects of the policy and its restrictions on employment on criminal activity.

Governments in the United States must offer free legal services to low-income people accused of crimes. To provide these services, many jurisdictions rely on assigned counsel systems, where private attorneys represent indigent defendants on a contract basis. These defendants are more likely to be convicted and incarcerated than defendants with privately retained attorneys. Using detailed court records, we investigate the mechanisms behind this disparity and consider their policy implications. We find that adverse selection among lawyers is not the primary contributor to the assigned counsel penalty. We conclude that reform efforts should address moral hazard in assigned counsel systems.

Violence against women is a critical problem across the world. In this paper, we exploit state and temporal variation in alcohol control in India to examine the impact of prohibition on alcohol consumption and violent crimes against women. We first use detailed household survey data to show that prohibition policies are associated with substantially lower rates of drinking among men and domestic violence. Next, we provide evidence that alcohol prohibition reduces aggregate violence against women in officially reported crime data. The results suggest that policies that restrict access to alcohol may help reduce gender violence.

Research on policing has focused on documented actions such as stops and arrests—less is known about patrols and presence. We map the neighborhood movement of nearly 10,000 officers across 21 of America’s largest cities using anonymized smartphone data. Police spend 0.36% more time in neighborhoods for each percentage point increase in Black residents. This neighborhood-level disparity persists after controlling for density, socioeconomic status, and crime-driven demand for policing, and may be lower in cities with more Black police supervisors (but not officers). Patterns of police presence statistically explain 57% of the higher arrest rate in more Black neighborhoods.