Misdemeanor Prosecution

We thank former Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins and the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office for their cooperation. Thanks to Rebecca Regan for excellent research assistance, to Manudeep Bhuller for code and discussions about calculating the complier means, to Martin Andresen for extensive help with the estimation of marginal treatment effects via mtefe, and to Mauricio Caceres-Bravo for help with estimation of UJIVE via manyiv. We thank Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Peter Hull, Michal Kolesár, Emily Leslie, Justin McCrary, Sam Norris, and Roman Rivera for conversations that improved the paper. We appreciate feedback from Jim Greiner, Steve Lehrer, James MacKinnon, Steven Raphael, Jeff Smith, and Megan Stevenson; seminar participants at American University, Bentley University, Boston University, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Georgia State University, LSE-Centre for Economic Performance, Michigan State University, Queen's University, Rutgers University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Toronto, University of Virginia School of Law, and West Virginia University; and conference participants at the 2020 Emory University Conference on Institutions and Law Making, the 2020 APPAM Fall Research Conference, and the 2020 Duke University Empirical Criminal Law Roundtable. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• March 24, 2021