6. Desmond Ang, Panka Bencsik, Jesse Bruhn, and Ellora Derenoncourt. (2025). Crime and Community Engagement with Law Enforcement after High-profile Acts of Police Violence. American Economic Review: Insights. 7 (1): 124–42.
5. Panka Bencsik, Lester Lusher, and Becca Taylor. (2025.) Slow Traffic, Fast Food: The Effects of Time Lost on Food Store Choice. Journal of Urban Economics. Vol. 146, 103737.
4. Panka Bencsik, Timothy Halliday, and Bhash Mazumder. (2023). The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom. Journal of Health Economics. Vol. 92. 102805.
3. Sergio Pinto, Panka Bencsik, Tuugi Chuluun, and Carol Graham. (2021). Presidential Elections, Divided Politics, and Happiness in the U.S. Economica. 88, no. 349 : 189-207.
2. Panka Bencsik, and Tuugi Chuluun. (2021). Comparative well-being of the self-employed and paid employees in the USA. Small Business Economics. 56, 355-384.
1. Panka Bencsik. (2018). The non-financial costs of violent public disturbances: Emotional responses to the 2011 riots in England. Journal of Housing Economics. 40, 73-82.
Cannabis Deregulation and Policing. (with Saayili Budhiraja**)
Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Drug crimes continue to make up a large share of offenses for which individuals interact with the criminal justice system, and Black Americans are arrested at four times the rate as white Americans despite similar usage rates. Policymakers in jurisdictions across the country have introduced the deregulation of the recreational use of cannabis, often with the explicit intention of reducing these disparities. Yet, causal evidence on the impact of this approach on who the police arrest is limited. In this paper, we exploit the rollout of the most widespread deregulatory approach, the decriminalization of cannabis possession, across the three largest US cities, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, using a difference-in-differences design. We find that decriminalization significantly reduced cannabis arrests across all three cities, though these effects were not always driven by reductions in arrests for the specific, smaller weight of the drug that became decriminalized. We observe that decriminalization improved racial disparities in arrests in Chicago by reducing small quantity possession arrests for Black individuals, and in Los Angeles by reducing large quantity possession arrests for both Black and Hispanic residents. Lastly, we extend our analysis to legalization and observe that legalization effectively decreased arrests for every racial and ethnic group we consider, with similar impacts across groups.
Drug Arrest Diversion. (with Ashna Arora) [Previously titled "Policing Substance Use: Chicago's Treatment Program for Narcotics Arrests."]
Award: Novartis Prize for best health economics paper, Irish Economic Association
Media coverage: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, The Crime Report, NewsNation, WTTW - Chicago PBS
Policy coverage: California Law Revision Commission, Office of the Mayor (Chicago) (with direct quote), National Center for State Courts
Author podcast interview: Probable Causation (40 minutes)
Video coverage: UChicago Crime Lab - Narcotics Arrest Diversion Program
Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached a record high of 107,573 in 2021, 75% of which involved opioids. In response, hundreds of police departments across the country have begun to divert individuals who possess drugs away from arrest and into substance use treatment. This paper evaluates the impact of this approach on future criminal justice system involvement as well as fatal overdose risk using arrest-level variation in diversion eligibility in Chicago between 2010-22. Drug arrest diversion primarily benefitted individuals who used narcotics every day, increased connections with substance use treatment, and reduced subsequent arrests, but had no discernible impact on fatal overdose risk.
Violence in the Vicinity: The Mental Health Impacts of Nearby Crime. (with Richard Dickens and George MacKerron)
Revision requested at Economica
Award: International Health Economics Association (iHEA), Graduate Student Paper Prize, Third prize
[Previously titled: Stress on the sidewalk: The mental health costs of close proximity crime.]
Crime leads to a range of adverse outcomes for those who live nearby. A common hypothesis is that this relationship is mediated by mental health. However, little is known about how the mental health of local residents is affected when an incident of violent crime occurs in their vicinity. To address this question, we pair granular crime data with uniquely detailed panel data on individual stress levels. Using nearly 50,000 responses from England's Thames Valley during the years 2010 to 2017, we find that local violent crime leads to an immediate and significant increase in residents' stress levels. We observe that this effect is strongest when the respondent is at home, and lasts approximately one week. We conclude that policies considering the total cost of crime—and conversely, crime prevention—should consider the adverse local mental health impacts of violent crime.
(* = graduate student co-author; ** = undergraduate student co-author)
Calls and Conduct: The Impact of Free Communication on Prison Misconduct. (with Nour Abdul-Razzak, Ashna Arora, and Omair Gill*)
The abstract describing this multi-year research project is available here.
Award: Program Chair award in the area of Crime and Health, American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon)
The Impact of Gunshots on Consumer and Business Activity. (with Jesse Bruhn)
Care Awareness and Health Outcomes: The New 988 Crisis Helpline
Local Prosecutors and Public Health. (with Tyler Giles)
(* = graduate student co-author; ** = undergraduate student co-author)
Slow Traffic, Fast Food: The effects of time lost on food store choice. IZA World of Labor, June 14, 2023 (with Lester Lusher and Becca Taylor)
Reducing substance abuse — without punishment. Chicago Tribune, December 1, 2022 (in print issue, lead Opinion piece) (with Ashna Arora)
Are the self-employed happy entrepreneurs?. Brookings Institution, September 29, 2017 (with Tuugi Chuluun and Carol Graham)