Research

We still know very little about the incentives of police. Using geocoded crime data and a novel source of within-city variation in punishment severity, I am able to shed light on enforcement behavior. I find that in parts of a city where drug sale penalties were weakened, there is a 13% decrease in all drug arrests. There is no displacement of non-drug offenses. If offenders were significantly deterred by harsher penalties, as the law intended and Becker’s (1968) model predicts, drug arrests should have increased in areas with weaker penalties. My results are therefore consistent with police treating enforcement effort and punishment severity as complements. I also find that city-wide crime and drug use do not increase after the reform. This paper thus calls into question the "War on Drugs" view of punishment and suggests that certain types of enforcement can be reduced without incurring large public safety costs.

This paper estimates the impacts of doctor crackdowns on the quantity demanded of prescription opioids, across-market substitution, and across-product substitution. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the timing and location of administrative actions, I find that cracking down on a single doctor decreases county-level opioid dispensing by 10%. This decline persists across space and grows over time. Additionally, significant heroin substitution occurs, yet overall overdose mortality decreases. These results highlight a critical tradeoff policymakers should consider with targeted crackdowns: reductions in the flow of new users must be balanced against the harm that arises when existing users substitute to more dangerous drugs.

Governments often cannot use prices to induce water conservation, and the need to understand the impacts of alternate methods is growing due to increased variability in water resources. During the 2012-2016 drought in California, a period that may presage the future of water management in a warmer climate, the state attempted to manage water use through a set of mandatory restrictions that assigned each of California's 412 largest urban water suppliers to one of nine conservation tiers; those with greater historic usage needed to conserve more. I find that even though significant statewide savings occurred, only half of all suppliers complied with their conservation target. Moreover, the increased savings were not caused by the tiered design of the mandate: evidence from a regression discontinuity design shows that suppliers that just missed a stricter conservation tier actually conserved more. Additionally, water use rebounded after the regulation was removed, implying that variable adjustments in demand contributed more to water use savings than fixed cost household investments. Given the significant costs of water regulation and the high probability of future droughts, the policy implication is that both governments and water suppliers may benefit from investments in water supply reliability and less complex prescriptive policies.

We provide novel evidence on the social spillovers of homeownership by exploiting a recent trend of institutional investors purchasing single-family homes and converting them to permanent rentals. Using a granular difference-in-difference design based on proximity to a single investor-purchased property, we find that neighboring property values decline by 2% relative to those slightly further away. This decline grows over time yet decays across space, and these same properties experience increases in crime and decreases in property maintenance and registered voters. Our heterogeneity analysis suggests an important role for property owners, rather than tenants, in these observed externalities.