Research

Immigration enforcement along the U.S.- Mexico border has become one of the most politically salient policy issues in the United States. Alhough immigration enforcement is formally a federal responsibility, changes in federal priorities across administrations have renewed debate over the role of states in shaping border policy. Texas, as the most exposed southern border, has taken an especially active role in this debate. This paper examines the impact of Texas’s Operation Lone Star (LS) on local court outcomes. LS is a large- scale border security policy launched in 2021 by Texas’ governor in response to increased illegal immigration. In counties included in the policy’s disaster declaration, thousands of Texas National Guard members and troopers were deployed to the border and empowered to arrest migrants for state-level crimes, such as criminal trespassing on private property. Exploiting the phased expansion of the state’s disaster declaration across counties, I estimate the effects of LS exposure on judicial congestion and adjudication patterns. Two-way fixed effects and modern difference-in-differences estimates show that exposure to the policy is associated with increases in pending case backlogs, stable clearance rates, higher conviction rates, and lower dismissal rates. Dynamic effects suggest that backlog pressures accumulate over time.

This paper estimates the ridership response to a sustained, system-wide deterioration in transit service quality at the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's (MBTA) heavy-rail system. Federal oversight prompted by years of deferred maintenance produced an extended period of slower service across essentially every pair of stations. To measure service quality, the paper introduces a gravity-style accessibility index that weights destinations by walkshed employment and normalizes the contemporaneous gravity sum pair-by-pair against a bin-matched pre-shock baseline; the resulting measure varies only with changes in transit times, isolating supply-side variation. A two-way fixed effects specification on a station-day panel covering 2018–2024 recovers a within-station elasticity of log ridership with respect to log accessibility deviations of 0.336 (s.e. 0.060), implying a transit-time elasticity of approximately –0.44; within the range of pre-pandemic estimates from the transit-demand literature. The result is robust to alternative weighting schemes, fixed-effects structures, sample windows, and a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood specification on the unfiltered panel; a complementary cross-sectional dose-response design built around the March 2023 systemwide order recovers a comparable slope. The findings argue that sharp, well-identified supply shocks offer a viable complement to the long-run time-series variation that has historically anchored estimates of transit-demand elasticities.

The majority of felony cases in the United States involve indigent clients represented by publicly financed attorneys. In this paper, we examine the effects of efforts to improve representation for economically disadvantaged defendants through the adoption of managed indigent defense offices (MIDs) in the state of Texas. MIDs impose a layer of oversight and accountability on attorneys providing indigent defense services. Taking advantage of the staggered roll-out of MIDs across Texas counties and newly compiled administrative arrest and prison records, we show that management can reduce conviction rates, with impacts growing over time. Simultaneous changes in observed sentences suggest that directly employed lawyers are less likely to enter guilty pleas for low-level offenses, while effective supervision of contracted lawyers may induce more effort in serious cases.