Below are abstracts and links to related resources for
published/accepted papers.
Journal of Law & Economics (forthcoming)
Abstract: I conduct a randomized controlled trial to causally test allegations that police in the U.S. struggle with equity and accountability. I email requests for assistance in making a complaint against an officer to over 2,000 police departments while manipulating the names of the fictitious complainant. I compare response rates according to the complainant’s race/ethnicity and gender. Departments were significantly less likely to respond to Black or Hispanic names than White names. White men received the highest response rate, and Black and Hispanic men the lowest. Results support the allegations that policing suffers from issues of bias and accountability.
Katie Bollman, Benjamin Hansen, Edward Rubin, and Garrett Stanford
Journal of Public Economics (2026)
Abstract: Using Measure 114’s narrow passage in Oregon as a natural experiment, we study how new gun regulations affect firearm demand. Background checks, a proxy for demand, rose 13.9% in anticipation of the referendum and surged 157% immediately following the election. After judicial intervention halted the law’s enactment, demand returned near pre-election levels. Temporal displacement/harvesting does not explain the demand spike: after eighteen months, we still observe a substantial cumulative increase of 63,000 excess firearm-related background checks. Administrative data reveal significant within-state heterogeneity. This evidence underscores the paradoxical effect of gun-control policies, offering a cautionary lesson to policymakers.
Garrett Stanford, Susana
Ferreira, Craig E.
Landry, Ben
Blachly
Ecosystem Services (2025)
Abstract: Natural infrastructure is increasingly
being recognized as a viable alternative or complement to traditional
‘grey’ infrastructure in addressing global infrastructural needs. From a
policy design perspective, selecting the optimal strategy among
alternatives requires complete knowledge of the costs and benefits
associated with each option. Unlike traditional infrastructure, natural
infrastructure delivers a host of ecosystem services that may be
difficult to quantify and monetize. Markets do not exist for many of the
ecosystem services associated with natural infrastructure, so monetizing
the suite of benefits requires specialized techniques from the field of
nonmarket valuation. In this paper we use bibliometric techniques to
systematically review the literature on economic valuation of ecosystem
services, natural infrastructure and, at their intersection, ecosystem
services provided by natural infrastructure. With a combination of
machine learning and keyword matching, we extract 6,796 relevant
articles published between 1990 and 2023 from the Web of Science
database. They reveal a dramatic increase in economic valuation studies
—especially in the last fifteen years, with a prominent focus on
recreation and tourism ecosystem services, marine infrastructure and
stated preference valuation methods. We also identify knowledge gaps in
terms of geographical coverage, ecosystem services, natural
infrastructure, and valuation methods considered, and we provide
suggestions for filling these gaps.