Radha Iyengar's Research

Papers

Does the Certainty of Arrest Reduce Domestic Violence? Evidence from Mandatory and Recommended Arrest laws

Domestic violence remains a major public policy concern despite two decades of policy intervention. To eliminate police inaction in response to domestic violence, many states have passed mandatory arrest laws, which require the police to arrest abusers when a domestic violence incident is reported. These laws were justified by a randomized experiment in Minnesota which found that arrests reduced future violence. This experiment was conducted during a time period when arrest was optional. Using the FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports, I find mandatory arrest laws actually increased intimate partner homicides. I hypothesize that this increase in homicides is due to decreased reporting. I investigate validity of this reporting hypothesis by examining the effect of mandatory arrest laws on family homicides where the victim is less often responsible for reporting. For family homicides, mandatory arrest laws appear to reduce the number of homicides. This study therefore provides evidence that these laws may have perverse effects on intimate partner violence, harming the very people they seek to help.

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I'd rather be Hanged for a Sheep than a Lamb: The Unintended Consequences of 'Three-Strikes' Laws

Strong sentences are common "tough on crime" tool used to reduce the incentives for individuals to participate in criminal activity. However, the design of such policies often ignores other margins along which individuals interested in participating in crime may adjust. I use California's Three Strikes law to identify several effects of a large increase in the penalty for a broad set of crimes. Using criminal records data, I estimate that Three Strikes reduced participation in criminal activity by 20 percent for second-strike eligible offenders and a 28 percent decline for third-strike eligible offenders. However, I find two unintended consequences of the law. First, because Three Strikes flattened the penalty gradient with respect to severity, criminals were more likely to commit more violent crimes. Among third-strike eligible offenders, the probability of committing violent crimes increased by 9 percentage points. Second, because California's law was more harsh than the laws of other nearby states, Three Strikes had a "beggar-thy-neighbor" effect increasing the migration of criminals with second and third-strike eligibility to commit crimes in neighboring states. The high cost of incarceration combined with the high cost of violent crime relative to non-violent crime implies that Three Strikes may not be a cost-effective means of reducing crime.

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An Analysis of the Performance of Federal Indigent Defense Attorneys

The right to an equal and fair trial regardless of wealth is a hallmark of American jurisprudence. To ensure this right, the government pays attorneys to represent financially needy clients. In the U.S. federal court system, indigent defendants are represented by either public defenders who are salaried employees of the court or private attorneys, known as Criminal Justice Act (CJA) attorneys, who are compensated on an hourly basis. This study measures differences in performance of these types of attorneys and explores some potential causes for these differences. Exploiting the use of random case assignment between the two types of attorneys, an analysis of federal criminal case level data from 1997-2001 from 51 districts indicates that public defenders perform significantly better than CJA panel attorneys in terms of lower conviction rates and sentence lengths. An analysis of data from three districts linking attorney experience, wages, law school quality and average caseload suggests that these variables account for over half of the overall difference in performance. These systematic differences in performance disproportionately affect minority and immigrant communities and as such may constitute a civil rights violation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

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Is there an Emboldenment Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq (with Jonathan Monten, Yale University)

The Iraq war is among the most divisive military operations in American political history, and the George W. Bush administration has not taken kindly to criticism. Administration supporters have generated controversy by suggesting that public criticism of its war policies undercut the United States' reputation for resolve and encouraging attacks on the United States. Opponents claim that this line of argument is intended to shut down legitimate and necessary public debate. Using data on insurgent attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify a possible "emboldenment" effect by comparing whether statements critical of the war have a differential impact on the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news. This difference-in-difference approach allows us to isolate the effect of information about the level of war criticism in the U.S. from the many other possible sources contributing to variation in insurgent attacks. We find that in periods immediately after a spike in war-critical statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. These results suggest that there is a small but measurable cost to open public debate in the form of higher attacks in the short-term, and insurgent organizations - even those motivated by religious or ideological goals - are strategic actors. However, these costs must be weighed against the gains from open, transparent debate. We present some suggestive evidence that the unconditional nature of the U.S. commitment results in underinvestment in security capacity relative to other domestic capacity by the Iraqi government. The divisive and hostile discourse by both sides in US political environments may therefore simultaneously encourage insurgents to challenge the national government and discourage the national government to take responsibility for the costs and risks of providing security independent of external support.

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Who's the Fairest in the Land: An Analysis of Jury and Judge Decisionmaking

In recent years the death penalty has come under increasing scrutiny because of what appears like disparate sentencing for minorities relative to white. However, some research suggests that as a fraction of the defendants on death row accurately represents the distribution of murder arrests nationwide. The question of whether the bias occurs at the sentencing stage, at some earlier stage, or at all is an issue of broad concern. Any bias would raise grave concerns about the procedural fairness of death penalty applications. In attempts to redress some of these due process concerns, the Supreme Court in Ring v. Arizona determined that all death penalty sentences must be determined by a jury rather than a judge. This decision affected death penalty procedures in 13 states and the federal government while leaving 26 states with the death penalty unaffected. Using this variation in the impact of the decision, I plan to evaluate how the use of juries versus judges affects the proportion of minorities that receive the death penalty.

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50,000 People a Day: Federal Domestic Violence Service Provision (with Lindsay Sabik, Harvard University)

Intimate partner violence is a serious and preventable health problem affecting more than 30 million Americans each year. Many victims receive emergency support services from local domestic violence programs. Despite this, information on the magnitude and distribution of services these programs provide nationwide is limited. In November 2006, the first-ever National Census on Domestic Violence Services was conducted to learn the frequency and correlates of emergency and crisis intervention services provided by domestic violence programs using safe, noninvasive collection methods. During the 24-hour survey period, 48,350 individuals used the services of 1,243 primary purpose domestic violence programs, corresponding to a population rate of 16 people per 100,000 inhabitants. Of the individuals served, 14,518 received emergency shelter, 7,989 received transitional housing and 25,843 received non-residential services only. Domestic violence programs were unable to meet 5,183 requests for services that day due to resource constraints. This survey provides the first national measurement of services provided by local domestic violence programs and suggest that seven times more individuals are served by domestic violence programs as compared to victims of violence-related injuries served on an average day in U.S. emergency rooms.

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The Political Economy of Disability Insurance: Effects from Legal Reforms of Pain Standards (with Giovanni Mastrobuoni, Collegio Carlo Alberto and CeRP)

The dramatic rise in the disability insurance roles in the last 20 years has been the subject of much controversy in both popular and academic circles. While, the relationship between DI and labor force participation has been the subject of a growing literature, the mechanism by which this transition from employment to DI remains unclear. We hypothesize that one mechanism is the state-level administration of the program which creates a classic principal-agent problem. This paper uses the increased discretion from legal standards on pain to analyze the effect of conflict of interests for DDS agencies---between SSA standards and state gubernatorial political interests. We find evidence that multi-term governors allow a greater fraction of applicants than do first term governors. We then develop a model that illustrates how these differences can be due to they type of monitoring conducted by the Social Security Administration. We provide additional evidence supporting this hypothesis in the form of sub-group analysis by economic and political constraints. Overall, we find evidence that the monitoring system is counter-productive and encourages politically motivate usage of critical social insurance programs.

(Available upon request)

A Neuroeconomic Analysis of Differing Patterns in Juror Decisions on Sexual Harassment and Contract Cases (with Joy Hirsch, Columbia University)

The judicial system relies on juries to dispassionately evaluate facts presented at trial to reach a fair legal decision. In sexual harassment cases, juries are charged with determining whether the behaviors presented might be perceived as intimidating, threatening, or offensive. In this adjudication process, jurors are asked to use a "reasonable woman" standard--as opposed to the "reasonable person" standard more commonly used in similar workplace dispute cases. However, there is little evidence to substantiate or repudiate the assumption by the Supreme Court that juries are able to call upon their emotional reserves when presented evidence of sexual harassment. We find a dichotomy in the neurocircuitry employed by mock jurors during decisions about cases that involve sexual harassment relative to cases that involve contractual disputes. Harassment cases tended to elicit activity associated with emotional processes while a control group of contract cases tended to elicit activity in associated with executive processes. We quantify the effects of this shift to emotional decisionmaking in terms of juror awards. Using data court cases from 1997 to 2001, we assign cases into one of these four categories based on the harassment forms in each case. We find that different forms of harassment elicit different settlement and award behaviors.

(Available upon request)

Ongoing Projects

Who Responds to Medical Information? The Implications of Changing Selection into Breastfeeding, 1950-2000 (with Martha Bailey), May 2008.

Does Reducing Transaction Costs in Household Bargaining Improve Women's Well-being? Evidence from Burundi (with Tom Vogl)

Do Special Courts for Sexual Assault Improve Reporting? Evidence from South Africa

Modeling and Measuring Crime Victim's Reporting Behavior

The Effect of Public Defender Reform on Juvenile Crime Recidivism: Evidence from Los Angeles

Radha Iyengar's Research