Search Results
Working Paper
Heterogeneous Impacts of Sentencing Decisions
We examine 70,581 felony court cases filed in Chicago, IL during the period 1990-2007. We exploit case randomization to assess the impact of judge assignment and sentencing decisions on the arrival rates of new charges. Relative to prior research, we document an important source of heterogeneity in the impact of incarceration on recidivism. Incarceration creates lasting reductions in recidivism among first offenders but not repeat offenders. We present suggestive evidence that these reductions among first offenders primarily reflect outcomes for offenders who live in lower-crime areas of the ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneous Impacts of Sentencing Decisions
We examine 70,581 felony court cases filed in Chicago, IL during the period 1990-2007. We exploit case randomization to assess the impact of judge assignment and sentencing decisions on the arrival rates of new charges. Relative to prior research, we document an important source of heterogeneity in the impact of incarceration on recidivism. Incarceration creates lasting reductions in recidivism among first offenders but not repeat offenders. We present suggestive evidence that these reductions among first offenders primarily reflect outcomes for offenders who live in lower-crime areas of the ...
Working Paper
Allocating Effort and Talent in Professional Labor Markets
In many professional service firms, new associates work long hours while competing in up-or-out promotion contests. Our model explores why these firms require young professionals to take on heavy work loads while simultaneously facing significant risks of dismissal. We argue that the productivity of skilled partners in professional service firms (e.g. law, consulting, investment banking and public accounting) is quite large relative to the productivity of their peers who are competent and experienced but not well-suited to the partner role. Therefore, these firms adopt personnel policies that ...
Newsletter
Chicago workshop on black–white inequality: a summary
The Chicago Workshop on Black?White Inequality, funded by the Searle Freedom Trust, meets on a semiannual basis to explore the causes and consequences of economic inequality between blacks and whites in the U.S. On December 15, 2006, the second meeting of the workshop was hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Working Paper
Pay for percentile
We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions our scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students. Because this scheme employs only ordinal information, our scheme allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. This approach removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and ...
Journal Article
What have we learned about the benefits of private schooling?
The author summarizes the literature on the relative performance of public and private schools over the past decade and assesses what we have learned from these studies. Although many questions remain unanswered, the author concludes that private schooling--in particular, Catholic schooling--can raise graduation rates. In addition, the author finds that minority students in large cities have the most to gain from private schooling.