I analyze the demand side impacts of a supply side intervention into the market for illegal drugs in what has been described as America's largest open air drug market. Beginning in 2018, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office and the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in an ambitious...

Violence is often viewed as an intrinsic feature of illicit markets, driven by competition, disputes, and predation. We argue that the connection between violence and markets is not exclusive to illicit markets and that in the absence of strong institutions these factors exist ubiquitously....

This note formalizes the synthetic difference-in-differences estimator for staggered treatment adoption settings, as briefly described in Arkhangelsky et al. (2021). To illustrate the importance of this estimator, I use replication data from Abrams (2012), I compare the estimators obtained using...

We ask what the relationship is between pawn shops and crime. The dominant narrative is that pawn shops reduce the transaction costs of crime and, consequently, promote it. We explore the alternative where pawn shops address the financial distress of those in need, which reduces the incentive to...