Research

Behavioral science shows that frictions can lead to substantial decision-action gaps when it comes to one-time decisions such as retirement savings choices and organ donations. However, it is unclear whether the removal of decision frictions can meaningfully impact behaviors that involve repeated decisions, which characterize many of our most pressing social problems. In this paper, we focus on an important and on its face exceptionally hard-to-change behavior—drug use. Prior efforts to encourage drug users to take up treatment have led to largely disappointing results. However, these efforts missed the key insight we examine in our study—that behavioral responses to frictions may well be non-linear. We study the largest police-led drug diversion program in the United States, a zero friction approach to linking drug arrestees with substance use treatment within police stations. We find that this approach leads to exceptionally high treatment take-up rates even for a population with especially hard to change behavior. We use a triple difference design to show the beneficial downstream impacts of this linkage on both the individual and society—lower likelihood of arrest (for both drug and violent offenses) and suggestive increases in connections with some shelter services, albeit no discernible impact on fatal or non-fatal overdose risk. 

Legal scholars argue that local prosecutors may be the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system, yet there is a limited understanding of how different prosecutorial approaches shape community level outcomes. This paper investigates the causal relationship between approaches taken by local criminal prosecutors—also called district attorneys—and community-level mortality rates. We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in prosecutorial approaches generated by closely contested partisan prosecutor elections, a context in which Republican prosecutorial candidates are commonly characterized as "tougher on crime." Using data from hundreds of closely contested partisan elections from 2010 to 2019 and a vote share regression discontinuity design, we find that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor reduces all-cause mortality rates among young men ages 20 to 29 by 6.6%. This decline is driven predominantly by reductions in firearm-related deaths, including a large reduction in firearm homicide among Black men and a smaller reduction in firearm suicides and accidents primarily among White men. Mechanism analyses indicate that increased prison-based incapacitation explains about one third of the effect among Black men and none of the effect among White men. Instead, the primary channel appears to be substantial increases in criminal conviction rates across racial groups and crime types, which then reduce firearm access through legal restrictions on gun ownership for the convicted.