Camilla Adams

The adversarial nature of the American criminal justice system presumes that competition between defense and prosecution yields fair outcomes, yet disparities in attorney skill may distort this process. This paper exploits the random assignment of attorneys in 15 years of administrative data from Bexar County, Texas, to estimate the causal effects of attorney skill composition on case outcomes. I find that skill composition has large symmetric and additive effects: a stronger defense attorney reduces the probability of incarceration by 10 percentage points, while a stronger prosecutor increases it by 9.7 percentage points. When attorneys are equally skilled, their effects are offset. Balanced attorney combinations along the skill distribution release defendants with similar demographics and propensities to recidivate, suggesting adversarial competition is upheld and that case outcomes are driven by the relative skill gap between attorneys rather than their absolute skill levels.

In preparation

Labor market search-and-matching models posit supply-side responses to minimum wage increases that may lead to improved matches and lessen or even reverse negative employment effects. Using event study analysis of recent minimum wage increases, we find that these changes do not affect the likelihood of searching, but do lead to transitory spikes in search effort by individuals already looking for work. These results are not driven by changes in the composition of searchers, and are concentrated among the groups most likely to be impacted by the minimum wage and in response to larger minimum wage increases.