Camilla Adams

The adversarial nature of the American criminal justice system presumes that competition between public defenders (PDs) and district attorneys (DAs) 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 value-added of attorneys on case outcomes. Attorney value-added has large effects on the probability of incarceration which are symmetric and additive such that having an above median DA (PD) and a below median PD (DA) increases (decreases) the probability of incarceration by approximately 10 percentage points. When attorneys have equal value-added, their effects cancel out, but imbalances in attorney value-added generate substantial variation in case outcomes. Even when PD and DA value-added are balanced, differences in attorney value-added affect the composition of released defendants: higher value-added pairs are more likely to release younger, first-time defendants, who subsequently exhibit higher rates of recidivism.

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.