Elder Financial Fraud: The Economic and Ethical Case for Instituting Mandatory Reporting Laws in Financial Institutions
by Lauren Tse
Abstract
This study examines the effectiveness of the 2016 NASAA Model Act, specifically if states that implemented its provisions see greater levels of elder fraud reporting. This legal reform introduces reporting requirements for broker-dealers and investment advisers to report suspected elder fraud to government authorities, granting explicit immunity to those who comply. To analyze both the immediate and longer-term effects of the Model Act’s staggered passage across states, I use a dynamic Difference-in-Difference model to analyze institutionally reported elder fraud cases from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Regression findings suggest that the Model Act has a positive enabling effect, increasing the number of elder fraud reports filed by financial professionals. Further, I quantify the monetary losses associated with these fraud cases using self-reported data from the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network. In line with this ‘placebo’ dataset, I find that the passage of the Model Act — targeted at financial professionals — has inconclusive impacts on the number of self-reported elder fraud and no effect on the financial losses incurred.
Professor Kate Bundorf, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: G28; K42; J14
Keywords: Elder Financial Fraud; NASAA Model Act; Mandatory Reporting Requirements
Action or Distraction? Assessing the Impact of Post-2020 Police Use of Force Reforms in American Cities
by Vineet Chovatia
Abstract
Between 2013 and 2024, police killed 13,468 people in the United States. Low-income communities of color, who are disproportionately targeted, bear the brunt of this violence. This reality reflects a legacy rooted in a deeply racist history that continues to shape American policing today. In the wake of regular, highly-publicized killings of unarmed Black and Brown Americans and large-scale social movements advocating for police reform, police departments in many American cities implemented a range of reforms over the course of the 21st century. We use data on the adoption of seven of these reforms along with police shootings and killings data from 94 of America’s largest cities to construct fixed effects difference in differences models that estimate the effect of these policies individually and in combination on police shootings and killings. Our findings suggest that chokehold bans, de-escalation policies, and comprehensive reporting reforms are associated with reductions in police shootings when implemented together while findings with regards to police killings are more mixed, but indicate that combinations of these policies are associated with reductions in killings as well.
Professor Michelle P. Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: C23, K42, K14
Keywords: Police Use of Force; Fixed Effect Difference in Differences; Post-2020 Police Reforms
The Effect of Gun Prevalence on the Occurrence of School Shootings
by Abigail Ullendorff
Abstract
This paper studies how gun prevalence, represented by federal firearm background checks, affects the occurrence of school shootings. While precedent literature has estimated adverse effects of school shootings on exposed children, including reductions in mental health, academic achievement, and labor market earnings, few studies have attempted to identify factors that influence school shooting frequency in the first place. The analysis sample is an annual state panel of shootings during 2000-2021, constructed from the proprietary K-12 School Shooting Database as well as from data on background checks, demographic characteristics, economic conditions, and measures of violence and mental health status. Estimates from difference-in-differences regressions that include state and year by-census region fixed effects and state-specific linear trends indicate a positive relationship between gun prevalence and school shootings, particularly when the dependent variable is specified as a binary indicator of multiple school shootings having occurred. Results are robust to using the annual shooting count or its quartic root, an indicator that a shooting occurred, Poisson regressions of school shooting count models, and quadratic state trends as additional controls. Several types of shootings, including targeted, elementary school, high school, and deadly shootings, increase in frequency and/or likelihood when gun prevalence rises.
Professor Jeffrey DeSimone, Faculty Advisor
Professor Grace Kim, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I18, I29, K42
A Two-Stage Analysis Considering Gun Theft & Overall Crime: Evidence from Child Access Prevention Laws
by Ronan Brew
Abstract
Child Access Prevention Laws (CAP) came to prominence in the early 1990s in the wake of the highest
recorded rate of overall and adolescent firearm deaths seen in the United States at that time, placing
mandatory firearm storage requirements on adults living in a home with children. While the primary – and
perhaps sole – intention behind these policies are to prevent adolescent gun death, I contend CAP laws have
the added function of reducing the rate of firearms stolen from homes due to the legal incentives against
improper firearm storage. In the first of a two-stage analysis, CAP laws are proven to substantially reduce
the rate of household firearm theft based on the ascending stringency of different CAP law storage
requirements. The scope of the study is then widened in the second stage of analysis, where I demonstrate
the overall impact illicitly-obtained firearms have on predicting increased firearm homicides.
Professor John DeSimone, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: C23, K00, K42
Patrolling the Future: Unintended Consequences of Predictive Policing in Chicago
By Jenny Jiao
In the past decade, police departments have increasingly adopted predictive policing programs in an effort to identify where crimes will occur and who will commit them. Yet, there have been few empirical analyses to date examining the efficacy of such initiatives in preventing crime. Using police and court data from the second-largest police department in the country, this paper seeks to evaluate the pilot version of Chicago’s Strategic Subject List, a person-based predictive policing program. Using a boundary discontinuity design, I find that individuals eligible for the Strategic Subject List were 2.07 times more likely to be found not guilty of all charges in court than similarly situated individuals in the control group. Taking into account crime category heterogeneity, I find evidence that individuals previously arrested for drug crimes drive this result. This research sheds light on the potential unintended consequences of person-based predictive policing.
Advisors: Professor Patrick Bayer, Professor Bocar Ba | JEL Codes: K4, K42, O33
How Expensive Is This Suit? An Analysis of Corporate Litigation Settlements and Brand Value
By Jenny Y. Zhang
Two recent corporate trends include a rise in litigation and companies’ increased emphasis on branding. This paper examines whether there is a relationship between the two phenomena by analyzing corporate litigation outcomes and brand value. Specifically, I examine law suits resulting in a settlement in order to determine whether a company’s brand value impacts the settlement amount. I do not find evidence of a relationship between a company’s brand value and the settlement value. Further research is needed in order to more conclusively determine whether a company’s brand value and the resulting settlement are related.
Advisors: Professor James Roberts, Professor Michelle Connolly, Professor Grace Kim | JEL Codes: K40, K41
Does Media Coverage of Sexual Assault Cases Cause Victims to Go to the Police? Evidence from FBI Data and Google Trends
By Harry Elworthy
This paper investigates the effect that national news coverage of prominent sexual assaults has on the reporting decisions of sexual assault victims. Estimates are based on time series data of reports made to police stations in the US from 2008 to 2016 and Google Trends data of search volume, along with an identification strategy that uses a number of individual high profile sexual assault allegations and related events as instruments. By removing assaults that occurred on the day that they were reported, I estimate the effect of coverage only on the reporting of assaults, and not on assaults themselves. A significant positive effect of news coverage on sexual assault reporting is found using several specifications. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that there were between 31 and 121 additional reports of sexual assault for each of the 38 high profile events captured. No evidence is found to suggest that these additional reports of sexual assault have different arrest rates to other reports, indicating that there are not a significant number of false reports. This paper adds to current literature on the sexual assault reporting decision by considering the effect of news coverage and by using different methods of inference to previous papers.
Advisor: Professor Patrick Bayer | JEL Codes: D91, J16, K42, L86, Z13
Security Without Equity? The Effect of Secure Communities on Racial Profiling by Police
By Jack Willoughby
Anecdotal and circumstantial evidence suggest that the implementation of Secure Communities, a federal program that allows police officers to more easily identify illegal immigrants, has increased racial bias by police. The goal of this analysis is to empirically evaluate the effect of Secure Communities on racial bias by police using motor vehicle stop and search data from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. This objective differs from most previous research, which has largely attempted to quantify racial profiling for a moment in time rather than looking at how an event influences racial profiling. I examine the effects of Secure Communities on police treatment of Hispanics vs. whites with an expanded difference-in-difference approach that looks at outcomes in motor vehicle search success rate, search rate conditional on a police stop, stop rate, and police action conditional on stop. Statistical analyses yield no evidence that the ratification of Secure Communities increased racial profiling against Hispanics by police. This finding is at odds with the anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that has led many to believe that the ratification of Secure Communities led to a widespread increase in racial profiling by police, a discrepancy that should caution policy makers about making decisions driven by stories and summary statistics.
Advisor: Frank Sloan | JEL Codes: J15, K14, K37, K42 | Tagged: Racial Policing, Bias, Immigration Law, Secure Communities
Marijuana Pricing Structure and State-Level Price Determinants
By Rebecca Li
This study uses the PriceofWeed.com data set first examined in Thies (2012) to analyze the price-quantity relationship for marijuana transactions and to determine the effect of various state-level factors on marijuana prices. By applying the cost-based full fixed cost recovery pricing model developed by Britney, Kuzdrall, and Fartuch (1983), this paper finds support for an inverse price-quantity relationship for marijuana rather than a logarithmic or linear relationship. User-rated quality is robust and significant across all models, and price-quantity discount elasticity of -0.220 is observed empirically. An analysis of state-level legal, demand-side, and supply-side determinants of marijuana price demonstrates that medical marijuana has a negative relationship with price, perhaps due to the reduction in risk faced by suppliers when medical marijuana is legalized.
Advisor: Michael Munger, Phil Cook | JEL Codes: D04, I18, K42 | Tagged: Marijuana, Price, Quality, Transaction Size
