by Andrew Leigh
57For a discussion of the complexity challenge inherent in this program, see Roland G. Fryer, ‘Teacher incentives and student achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools’, Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 373–407.
58J.A. Marsh, M.G. Springer, D.F. McCaffrey, et al., ‘A Big Apple for educators: New York City’s experiment with schoolwide performance bonuses’, Final Evaluation Report, Fund for Public Schools, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2011; Roland G. Fryer, ‘Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools’, Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 373–407.
59For a review of this literature, see Andrew Leigh, ‘The economics and politics of teacher merit pay’, CESifo Economic Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–33.
60Alan B. Krueger, ‘Experimental estimates of education production functions’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 114, no. 2, 1999, pp. 497–532.
61Author’s conversation with former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander.
62Eric P. Bettinger, Bridget Terry Long, Philip Oreopoulos & Lisa Sanbonmatsu, ‘The role of application assistance and information in college decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA experiment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 127, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1205–42.
63Philip Oreopoulos & Reuben Ford, ‘Keeping college options open: A field experiment to help all high school seniors through the college application process’, NBER Working Paper No. 22320, Cambridge, MA: NBER, 2016.
64Benjamin L. Castleman & Lindsay C. Page, ‘Summer nudging: Can personalized text messages and peer mentor outreach increase college going among low-income high school graduates?’ Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 115, 2015, pp. 144–60.
65Justine S. Hastings, Christopher Neilson & Seth Zimmerman, ‘The effects of earnings disclosure on college enrollment decisions’, NBER Working Paper 21300, Cambridge, MA: NBER, 2015.
66Caroline M. Hoxby & Sarah Turner, ‘What high-achieving low-income students know about college’, American Economic Review, vol. 105, no. 5, 2015, pp. 514–17.
67Nadine Ketel, Edwin Leuven, H. Oostereck & Bas van der Klaauw, ‘The returns to medical school: Evidence from admission lotteries’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol. 8, no. 2, 2016, pp. 225–54.
68OECD, Education at a Glance 2016, Paris: OECD, 2016, p. 166
69Eric P. Bettinger & Rachel B. Baker, ‘The effects of student coaching: An evaluation of a randomized experiment in student advising’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 36, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3–19.
70Joshua Angrist, Daniel Lang & Philip Oreopoulos, ‘Incentives and services for college achievement: Evidence from a randomized trial’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009, pp. 136–63.
71The phrase comes from Laura Haynes, Ben Goldacre & David Torgerson, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials, London: Behavioural Insights Team, Cabinet Office, 2012.
6 CONTROLLING CRIME
1Ross Peake, ‘ACT police chief learnt a valuable restorative justice lesson early on’, Canberra Times, 20 July 2015.
2Heather Strang, Lawrence W. Sherman, Evan Mayo-Wilson et al., Restorative Justice Conferencing (RJC) Using Face-to-Face Meetings of Offenders and Victims: Effects on Offender Recidivism and Victim Satisfaction. A Systematic Review, Campbell Systematic Reviews 2013:12, Oslo: Campbell Collaboration, 2013.
3For example, 4 per cent of Australian homicides are motivated by revenge: Willow Bryant & Tracy Cussen, ‘Homicide in Australia: 2010–11 to 2011–12’, National Homicide Monitoring Program report no. 23, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2015.
4According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, the violent crime rate exceeded 750 offences per 100,000 people in 1991 and 1992, but was below 375 offences per 100,000 people in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
5In 2015, there were 1,526,800 people held in federal and state prisons (E. Ann Carson and Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Prisoners in 2015’, Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice, NCJ 250229, 2016) plus another 721,300 in local jails (Todd D. Minton and Zhen Zeng, ‘Jail inmates in 2015’, Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice, NCJ 250394, 2016). According to the US Census Bureau, the resident population aged eighteen and over was 247 million in 2015, making the adult incarceration rate 0.9 per cent. For historical trends, see National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2014.
6Bruce Western & Becky Pettit, ‘Incarceration & social inequality’, Dædalus, Summer 2010, pp. 8–19.
7Sara B. Heller, Anuj K. Shah, Jonathan Guryan, et al., ‘Thinking, fast and slow? Some field experiments to reduce crime and dropout in Chicago’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 132, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–54. A third randomised trial tested the impact of a similar cognitive behavioural therapy program in a Chicago youth detention facility, and found that it reduced the return rate by 21 per cent.
8Quoted in Drake Baer, ‘This simple program is dramatically reducing teen violence in Chicago’, Tech Insider, 29 February 2016.
9Christopher Blattman, Julian C. Jamison & Margaret Sheridan, ‘Reducing crime and violence: Experimental evidence from cognitive behavioral therapy in Liberia’, American Economic Review, vol. 107, no. 4, 2017, pp. 1165–1206.
10Reply to a criticism during the Great Depression of having changed his position on monetary policy, as quoted in Alfred L. Malabre, Lost Prophets: An Insider’s History of the Modern Economists, 1994, p. 220.
11Sara B. Heller, ‘Summer jobs reduce violence among disadvantaged youth’, Science, vol. 346, no. 6214, 2014, pp. 1219–23.
12Catherine Jacquet, ‘Domestic violence in the 1970s’, Circulating Now blog, US National Library of Medicine, 15 October 2015 (available at https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov).
13Joan Zorza, ‘The criminal law of misdemeanor domestic violence, 1970–1990’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 83, no. 1, 1992, pp. 46–72.
14Fran S. Danis, ‘A tribute to Susan Schechter The visions and struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement’, Affilia, vol. 21, no. 3, 2006, pp. 336–41.
15Lawrence Sherman & Richard Berk, ‘The Minneapolis domestic violence experiment’, Police Foundation Reports, Washington DC: Police Foundation, 1984.
16Quoted in Sherman & Berk, ‘The Minneapolis domestic violence experiment’.
17According to police reports, rates of violence in the following six months were 10 per cent with arrest, 19 per cent with advise, and 24 per cent with send. According to victim reports, rates were 19 per cent with arrest, 37 per cent with advise, and 33 per cent with send. Sherman & Berk, ‘The Minneapolis domestic violence experiment’; Lawrence Sherman & Richard Berk, ‘The specific deterrent effects of arrest for domestic assault’, American Sociological Review, vol. 49, no. 2, 1984, pp. 261–72.
18James LeMoyne, ‘A firmer response to family strife’, New York Times, 15 April 1984.
19Associated Press, ‘Arrest may be deterrent in domestic violence, study shows’, New York Times, 30 May 1984.
20E.S.Buzawa & C.G. Buzawa,1990, Domestic Violence: The Criminal Justice Response, New York, Russell Sage, pp. 94–9.
21C. Nadine Wathen & Harriet L. MacMillan, ‘Interventions for violence against women: Scientific review’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 289, no. 5, 2003, pp. 589–600.
22Globally, family violence accounts for 47 per cent of female homicides (43,600 victims) and 6 per cent of male homicides (20,000 victims): United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNDOC Global Study on Homicide 2013, United Nations No. 14.IV.1, Vienna: UNDOC, 2014, p. 53.
23United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Study on Homicide 2013, p. 49.
24John Crace, ‘Lawrence Sherman: Crime scene investigations’, Guardian, 16 May 2007.
25Crace, ‘Lawrence Sherman’.
> 26‘Lawrence Sherman on Criminology’, Social Science Bites, 1 May 2013
27Émile Durkheim, ‘The rules of sociological method’ in Scott Appelrouth & Laura Desfor Edles (eds), Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory: Text and Readings, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2007 [1895], pp. 95–102.
28Lawrence W. Sherman, Dennis P. Rogan, Timothy Edwards, et al., ‘Deterrent effects of police raids on crack houses: A randomized, controlled experiment’, Justice Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 4, 1995, pp. 755–81.
29Anthony A. Braga, ‘Hot spots policing and crime prevention: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials’, Journal of Experimental Criminology, vol. 1, no. 3, 2005, pp. 317–42.
30David L. Weisburd & Lorraine Green, ‘Policing drug hot spots: The Jersey City drug market analysis experiment’, Justice Quarterly, vol. 12, 1995. pp. 711–35.
31The study reports a reduction of fifty-three violent crimes over a three-month period, which translates to over 200 crimes per year. Jerry H. Ratcliffe, Travis Taniguchi, Elizabeth R. Groff & Jennifer D. Wood, ‘The Philadelphia foot patrol experiment: A randomized controlled trial of police patrol effectiveness in violent crime hotspots’, Criminology, vol. 49, no. 3, 2011, pp. 795–831. Thanks to Jerry Ratcliffe for confirming my interpretation of these results.
32Anthony Braga, Andrew Papachristos & David Hureau, ‘Hot spots policing effects on crime’, Campbell Systematic Reviews, vol. 8, Oslo: Campbell Collaboration, 2012.
33National Institutes of Justice, ‘Practice profile: Hot spots policing’, available at crimesolutions.gov.
34Anthony Allan Braga & David Weisburd, Policing Problem Places: Crime Hot Spots and Effective Prevention, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
35L.W. Sherman, ‘Policing for crime prevention’ in L.W. Sherman, D.C. Gottfredson, D.L. MacKenzie, et al. (eds), Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, Washington, DC: US Office of Justice Programs., 1997, Chapter 8.
36Gary D. Sherman & Jonathan Haidt, ‘Cuteness and disgust: The humanizing and dehumanizing effects of emotion’, Emotion Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 245–51.
37‘Ice storm’, The Economist, 15 April 2017.
38Gay Murrell, ‘Breaking the cycle: NSW Drug Court’ Australian Law Reform Commission Reform Journal, vol. 77, 2000, pp. 20–24, 90.
39The first Drug Court was established in Florida in 1989.
40Bronwyn Lind, Don Weatherburn, Shuling Chen, et al., NSW Drug Court evaluation: Cost-effectiveness, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Sydney, 2002, p. 44. A second study of the Drug Court has also been conducted, though this evaluation did not use random assignment. See Don Weatherburn, Craig Jones, Lucy Snowball & Jiuzhao Hua, ‘The NSW Drug Court: A re-evaluation of its effectiveness’, Crime and Justice Bulletin, no. 121, 2008.
41Adele Harrell, Shannon Cavanagh & John Roman, ‘Findings from the evaluation of the DC Superior Court Drug intervention program’, submitted to the National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC, 1998: The Urban Institute; Denise C. Gottfredson, Stacy S. Najaka & Brook Kearley, ‘Effectiveness of drug treatment courts: Evidence from a randomized trial’, Criminology & Public Policy, vol. 2, no. 2, 2003, pp. 171–96.
42Quoted in Malcolm Knox, ‘Applause for former drug users who turn their lives around’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 2009.
43Quoted in Knox, ‘Applause’.
44Quoted in Knox, ‘Applause’.
45Craig Jones, ‘Intensive judicial supervision and drug court outcomes: Interim findings from a randomised controlled trial’, Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice, no. 152, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, 2011.
46Quoted in Sam Kornell, ‘Probation that works’, Slate, 5 June 2013.
47The study was based on 493 probationers. See Angela Hawken & Mark Kleiman, ‘Managing drug involved probationers with swift and certain sanctions: Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE’, Department of Justice Report 229023, National Institute of Justice, Washington DC, 2009; National Institute of Justice, ‘“Swift and certain” sanctions in probation are highly effective: Evaluation of the HOPE Program’, Washington DC: National Institute of Justice, 2012.
48Quoted in Hawken & Kleiman, ‘Managing drug involved probationers’.
49Evaluations of some of these programs show that they have not delivered effects as sizeable as those seen in Hawaii. On the rollout of HOPE across the United States, see Lorana Bartels, Swift, Certain and Fair: Does Project HOPE Provide a Therapeutic Paradigm for Managing Offenders?, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. The disappointing replication study of HOPE was conducted in Arkansas, Massachusetts, Oregon and Texas, and is reported in Pamela Lattimore, Doris Layton MacKenzie, Gary Zajac, et al., ‘Outcome findings from the HOPE demonstration field experiment’, Criminology & Public Policy, vol. 15, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1103–41.
50Adam Gamoran, ‘Measuring impact in science education: Challenges and possibilities of experimental design’, NYU Abu Dhabi Conference, January 2009.
51Doris L. MacKenzie & David P. Farrington, ‘Preventing future offending of delinquents and offenders: What have we learned from experiments and meta-analyses?’ Journal of Experimental Criminology, vol. 11, no. 4, 2015, pp. 565–95.
52Australian incarceration rates were higher in the colonial era than they are today, but the 2016 rate was higher than at any time since 1901: Andrew Leigh, ‘Locking someone up costs around $300 a day or about $110,000 a year’, Canberra Times, 14 November 2016.
53National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration.
54Mark A.R. Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
55National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration, p. 155. See also Council of Economic Advisers, ‘Economic perspectives on incarceration and the criminal justice system’, Washington DC: Executive Office of the President of the United States, 2016.
56John E. Berecochea & Dorothy R. Jaman, Time Served in Prison and Parole Outcome: An Experimental Study: Report, No. 2. Research Division, California Department of Corrections, 1981.
57Ina Jaffe, ‘Cases show disparity of California’s 3 strikes law’, NPR All Things Considered, 30 October 2009.
7 VALUABLE EXPERIMENTS IN POOR COUNTRIES
1This account is drawn from ‘Nigeria, You Win!’, Planet Money, Episode 702, 20 May 2016.
2David J. McKenzie, ‘Identifying and spurring high-growth entrepreneurship: Experimental evidence from a business plan competition’, American Economic Review, vol. 107, no. 8, 2017 pp. 2278–307.
3Chris Blattman, ‘Is this the most effective development program in history?’, chrisblattman.com, 24 September 2015.
4Data to 2012 from testimony of Professor Dean Karlan before the US Committee on Financial Services inquiry, ‘The multi-lateral development banks: A strategy for generating increased return on investment’, 9 October 2015. Data from 2013 to 2015 from Jorge Miranda, Shayda Sabet & Annette N. Brown, ‘Is impact evaluation still on the rise?’, blogs.3ieimpact.org, 11 August 2016. Counting the number of randomised trials published on child health in developing nations, there was a seven-fold increase from 2002–03 to 2012–13: Trevor Duke and David Fuller, ‘Randomised controlled trials in child health in developing countries: Trends and lessons over 11 years’, Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol. 99, no. 7, 2014, pp. 615–20.
5See Table 3 in Drew B. Cameron, Anjini Mishra & Annette N. Brown, ‘The growth of impact evaluation for international development: how much have we learned?’, Journal of Development Effectiveness, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–21.
6Quoted in Jeff Tollefson, ‘Revolt of the Randomistas’, Nature, vol 524, 13 August 2015, pp. 150–3.
7William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
8Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953.
>
9Quoted in Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan & Jonathan Zinman. ‘Six randomized evaluations of microcredit: Introduction and further steps’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–21.
10Jim Klobuchar & Susan Cornell Wilkes, The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism, Minneapolis: Kirk House Publishers, 2003, p. 26.
11Bill Clinton, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, New York: Random House, 2007, pp.6–7.
12Quoted in Dean Karlan & Jacob Appel, More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty, New York: Penguin, 2011, p. 61.
13Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman, ‘Six randomized evaluations of microcredit’. See also Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, ‘Where Credit is Due’, Policy Bulletin, February 2015, available at www.povertyactionlab.org.
14Karlan & Appel, More Than Good Intentions, p. 70
15Dean Karlan, Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan & Jonathan Zinman, ‘Savings by and for the poor: A research review and agenda’, Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 60, no. 1, 2014, pp. 36–78.
16The actual exchange was a little more complex. For details, see Robert Deis, ‘“The rich are different” The real story behind the famed “exchange” between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway’, Quote/Counterquote, 12 July 2014.
17Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Nathanael Goldberg, et al., ‘A multifaceted program causes lasting progress for the very poor: Evidence from six countries’, Science, vol. 348, no. 6236, 2015.
18See www.givedirectly.org.
19The experiment is described in Michael Faye & Paul Niehaus, ‘What if we just gave poor people a basic income for life? That’s what we’re about to test’, Slate, 14 April 2016; Dylan Matthews, ‘A charity’s radical experiment: Giving 6,000 Kenyans enough money to escape poverty for a decade’, Vox, 15 April 2016.
20Stefan Dercon, Tanguy Bernard, Kate Orkin & Alemayehu Taffesse, ‘The future in mind: Aspirations and forward-looking behaviour in rural Ethiopia’, Working paper 2014–16, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, 2014.