Governments in the United States must offer free legal services to low-income people accused of crimes. To provide these services, many jurisdictions rely on assigned counsel systems, where private attorneys represent indigent defendants on a contract basis. These defendants are more likely to be convicted and incarcerated than defendants with privately retained attorneys. Using detailed court records, we investigate the mechanisms behind this disparity and consider their policy implications. We find that adverse selection among lawyers is not the primary contributor to the assigned counsel penalty. We conclude that reform efforts should address moral hazard in assigned counsel systems.

We exploit a sudden shock to demand for a subset of low-wage workers generated by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program in San Antonio, Texas, to identify the effects of localized economic development on crime. We use a difference-in-differences methodology that takes advantage of variation in BRAC’s impact over time and across neighborhoods. We find that appropriative criminal behavior increases in neighborhoods where a fraction of residents experienced increases in earnings. This effect is driven by residents who were unlikely to be BRAC beneficiaries, implying that criminal opportunities are important in explaining patterns of crime.

Using geographically disaggregated data and exploiting an instrumental variable strategy, we show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) were progressive. The CAAA created incentives for local regulators to target the initially dirtiest areas for cleanup, creating heterogeneity in the incidence of air quality improvements that favored lower-income households. Based on house price appreciation, households in the lowest quintile of the income distribution received annual benefits from the program equal to 0.3% of their income on average during the 1990s, over twice as much as those in the highest quintile.