Working Papers
Property Taxation as Compensation for Local Externalities: Evidence from Large Plants (joint with Rebecca Cannon Fraenkel) [Job Market Paper]
The external costs and benefits of large capital-intensive projects such as industrial plants, ports and pipelines often occur on dramatically different spatial scales. When local jurisdictions have control over land-use, this spatial mismatch can prevent socially beneficial projects from moving forward or allow socially harmful projects to be built. In this paper, we explore how local control of property taxation, one potentially important localized benefit of these projects, can impact land-use decisions in the context of large plants. We first demonstrate that property tax payments from plant openings are both economically large and valued by local residents as measured through changes in home prices. We next show that limiting local jurisdictions' access to property taxation affects their exposure to large plants by using a series of school finance reforms as plausibly exogenous shocks. Following these reforms, we observe significant declines in large manufacturing establishments and local manufacturing employment per capita both in absolute and relative terms. These results suggest that increased property tax revenues are an important local benefit of large externality-producing projects and that policies which affect local property taxation can have major unintended consequences for non-residential land-use.
Enforcing Compliance: The Case of Automatic License Suspensions
Non-incarcerative punishments such as fines are widely-used in the United States criminal justice system. This class of punishments involves a compliance choice---an offender can choose to pay the fine or to face the consequences of nonpayment. In this paper, I first show that this compliance choice has two major implications: i) deterrence can be equivalently increased through increases in fines or increases in punishments for noncompliance and ii) the choice of instrument will have large distributional consequences. I then test these theoretical predictions empirically using a natural experiment in Washington state that mandated automatic driver's license suspensions for noncompliance with traffic offenses, a policy already in effect in more than 40 states and leading to millions of license suspensions annually. Using a regression-discontinuity design, I show that the automatic license suspension policies have large effects on punishment compliance, long-run fine repayment and license suspension rates. Using a combination of regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs, I further show evidence that this policy decreases traffic violations and traffic accidents among lower-income drivers suggesting that the policy is an effective, but highly regressive way to increase traffic safety.
Enforcing regulations through litigation is an important tool for policymakers, but in many settings we lack strong empirical evidence on litigation's effectiveness and incidence. I study this question using a major environmental enforcement initiative, which led to more than $25 billion in settlement compliance costs across more than 1/3 of US coal-fired power plants. I show that this initiative did indeed lead to large (~20%) decreases in emissions of NOX and sulfur dioxide. These decreased emissions further led to meaningful improvements in local air quality and decreases in local cardiovascular mortality rates. I conclude by examining who bore the costs for these improvements. I find that in regulated electricity markets, the average electricity retail price increased by 10% following a settlement, suggesting that the cost of improvements was largely paid for by utility ratepayers.
The Effect of District Attorneys on Local Criminal Justice Outcomes
In the United States, elected district attorneys' offices prosecute over 85% of all felony cases, but we know little about their effect on local criminal justice outcomes. Using a newly-collected dataset of district attorney elections, I show that Republican district attorneys lead to a 18-21% increase in new prison admissions in the two years following their election, while nonwhite district attorneys lead to a 10% decline. In both cases, there are no significant effects on local crime or arrest rates. These results show that the identity of the local district attorney is an important determinant of incarceration rates.