How does immigration enforcement affect public safety? Heightened enforcement could reduce crime by deterring and incapacitating immigrant offenders or, alternatively, increase crime by discouraging victims from reporting offenses. We study the U.S. Secure Communities program, which expanded...

Do reductions in arrests increase crime? We study line-of-duty deaths of police officers, events that likely impact police behavior through increased fear but are unlikely to directly impact civilian behavior. Officer deaths cause significant short-term reductions in all arrest types, with the...

Can political leaders change constituents' beliefs? If so, is it rhetoric, identity, or the interaction of the two that matters? We construct a large-scale experiment where participants are exposed to anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant speeches from both Presidents Obama and Trump. We benchmark...

Understanding the impact of police on crime is critical to designing policies that maximize safety. In this paper, I use a novel estimation approach to measure the impact of police hiring, which exploits variation in federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grants, while also...