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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
