The majority of felony cases in the United States involve indigent clients represented by publicly financed attorneys. In this paper, we examine the effects of efforts to improve representation for economically disadvantaged defendants through the adoption of managed indigent defense offices (MIDs) in the state of Texas. MIDs impose a layer of oversight and accountability on attorneys providing...
This paper studies the earnings and employment penalties associated with a criminal record. Using a large-scale dataset linking criminal justice and employer-employee wage records, we estimate two-way fixed effects models that decompose earnings into worker’s portable earnings potential and firm pay premia, both of which are allowed to shift after a worker acquires a record. We find that firm pay...
This study documents how corruption can result in large-scale welfare consequences by exacerbating the damage from catastrophic events. Using an original dataset of 1,050 buildings from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China, I show that buildings constructed when local officials had hometown connections to their supervisors were 75% more likely to collapse than were those built when officials had...
We evaluate rationales for income-based speeding fines. Such fines are famously applied in Finland, where a $250 offense for a low-income speeder can cost $100,000 for the rich. We consider four potential policy goals—externality mitigation, redistribution, equal compliance, and proportional punishment—using linked Finnish administrative data and an original survey. First, using a “job-loss”...
Homeownership is far less prevalent in Germany than in most other European countries. This Weekly Report examines the extent to which homeownership in Germany depends on the ownership status of parents and how the association has changed over time. Homeownership rates are significantly lower among younger birth cohorts than among older cohorts. At the same time, intergenerational mobility toward renting ...
This paper studies the labor market impact of structural change by distinguishing between industry- and occupation-based measures of manufacturing and service employment. Using German data from 1975–2019, we find that 67% of manufacturing jobs lost in manufacturing industries are offset by new manufacturing jobs in service industries. Linking these aggregate patterns to worker-level outcomes, we show ...
