David Bjerk’s research while affiliated with Claremont McKenna College and other places

Objectives We examine the relationship between incarceration rates individuals experience in their thirties and the crime conditions they experienced throughout their youth.Methods We employ a cross state panel data regression design to assess how the crime conditions state/birth-year cohort members experienced from adolescence through their twenties impacts their incarceration rates in their early thirties.ResultsBirth-year cohorts who experienced higher crime during adolescence had substantially higher incarceration rates in their early thirties than birth-year cohorts in the same state who experienced lower crime during adolescence. By contrast, the crime rates state/birth-year cohorts experienced during their late teens and early twenties have little systematic relationship with their incarceration rates in their thirties.Conclusions The crime conditions individuals are exposed to during adolescence appear to be pivotal with respect to their long-term connections with the criminal justice system.

This paper examines the impact of police funding on the fraction of homicides that are cleared by arrest. Using data covering homicides in approximately 50 of the largest US cities from 2007 to 2017, I find no evidence that greater police funding resulted in higher homicide clearance rates. This finding is robust to linear regression and instrumental variable approaches, different ways to measure police budgets, and across victims of different races and in different types of neighborhoods. In summary, the way large city police departments have historically spent their funds, more funding has not helped catch more murderers.

This paper investigates optimal plea bargaining when trials are costly, defendant guilt is uncertain, and juries rationally respond to the plea bargaining policy employed. The model shows that when innocence rates among the arrested are low, it is optimal to offer all defendants pleas that are acceptable to guilty and innocent defendants. However, as the innocence rate becomes more significant, optimal plea policy switches to one in which plea offers are only acceptable to guilty defendants. However, even when optimal, the societal benefits to such separating policies are limited due to constraints on the frequency such offers can be made. (JEL D6, D8, K4)

This comment discusses Sander's replication and extensions of Ayers and Brooks (2004) and Ho (2005). While these papers argued that their results largely negate the possibility of that there exist large “mismatch” effects in law schools associated with preferential admissions given to black applicants, Sander argues that when he corrects and/or extends their methods, the results largely suggest mismatch to be quite prevalent. As I discuss below, I think both of these conclusions are too strong. Even under Sander's replications and extensions, the evidence both for or against mismatch is simply quite weak given these data and methods.

This paper uses two “samples-of-opportunity” datasets to examine whether principal evaluations of teachers differ systematically across genders after controlling for arguably gender unbiased measures of teacher productivity---namely value-added student test scores calculated relative to other teachers in the same grade/school (where teachers are randomly allocated to classrooms within the same grade/school). While the two datasets appear to be quite similar in nature, both were samples-of-opportunity in that they were not representative of any particular population. Our findings differ substantially across datasets. This exercise reveals how results in the education and discrimination literature may be sensitive to the sample used. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA) affected the U.S. federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws for crack cocaine offenders, and represented the first congressional reform of sentencing laws in over 20 years. A primary goal of this legislation was to lessen the harshness of sentences for crack cocaine offenders and decrease the sentencing gap between crack defendants and powder cocaine defendants. While the mean sentence length for crack offenders fell following the implementation of the FSA, these changes appear to primarily reflect the continuation of ongoing sentencing trends that were initiated by a variety of noncongressional reforms to federal sentencing policy that commenced around 2007. However, the FSA appears to have been helpful in allowing these trends to continue past 2010.

The US federal mandatory minimum sentences are controversial not only because of the length of the mandatory sentences for even first-time offenders but also because eligibility quantities for crack cocaine crimes are small compared with those for other drug offenses. This paper shows that the impact of these mandatory minimums on sentencing is quite nuanced. A large fraction of mandatory-minimum-eligible offenders, particularly first timers, are able to avoid these mandatory minimums. Moreover, despite lower eligibility thresholds for crack-related offenses, a smaller fraction of those convicted of crack-related offenses are eligible for mandatory minimums relative to those convicted of other drug offenses. Furthermore, while being just eligible for a mandatory minimum increases sentence length on average, the impact is not uniform across drug offenses. Notably, sentences for crack offenders are generally sufficiently long such that, on average, sentences for crack offenders are not impacted by eligibility for a mandatory minimum.

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to explore individuals’ motivations for redistribution. The laboratory results show that as income uncertainty diminishes, participants become more extreme in their preferences for redistribution. The findings suggest that for most people, the motivation for redistribution is financial self-interest—namely as insurance against future bad luck—rather than furthering equity. However, a non-negligible group of participants propose redistribution levels inconsistent with financial self-interest, where this group is primarily made up of those with the least to lose financially from making such a proposal, and the size of this group increases when participants can communicate prior to proposing. Survey data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and General Social Survey show that these experimental findings may help shed light on the way preferences for redistribution evolve with age in the real world.