working papers

• Beyond Hot Spots: Enhancing Police Effectiveness by Incorporating a Spatial Network Approach [August 2026], joint with Corrado Giulietti and Yves Zenou [submitted]


• Kicking You When You're Already Down: The Multipronged Impact of Austerity on Crime [April 2026], joint with Corrado Giulietti


• Information Disclosure and the Valuation of Energy Efficiency in Housing Markets [April 2026], joint with Arpita Ghosh and Jaime Millán-Quijano


• Unbundling a Large-Scale School Reform: Evidence from New York City Community Schools [April 2026], joint with Parunjodhi Munisamy and Mariyana Zapryanova


• From Screen to Script: Media Shocks and the Margins of Health Care Utilization [March 2026], joint with Emmanouil Mentzakis and Rhys Llewellyn Thomas


• Liquid Assets: Plasma Donation Income and Crime [December 2025], joint with Samuel Kang and Mariyana Zapryanova


• Dissecting Demand-Side Welfare Manipulation [March 2025], joint with Jaime Millán-Quijano


• On the Marriage Wage Premium [February 2025], joint with Arnau Valladares-Esteban


• Can't see the Forest for the logs: On the Perils of using Difference-in-Differences with a log-Dependent Variable [February 2024]


• Do Employers Positively Discriminate Married Workers? [January 2023], joint with Arnau Valladares-Esteban


• Racial Sentencing Disparities and Differential Progression Through the Criminal Justice System: Evidence From Linked Federal and State Court Data [April 2022] [foundation-level reworking]

selected active projects

• The Consequences of Solitary Confinement, joint with Arnaud Philippe


• Multi-stage Discrimination, joint with Bobby Pakzad-Hurson and Matthew Pecenco


• House Prices, Well-being, and Homicides, joint with Arpita Ghosh and Corrado Giulietti

older working papers

• The Result of 11+ Selection: An Investigation into Opportunities and Outcomes for Pupils in Selective LEAs [April 2007], joint with Adele Atkinson and Paul Gregg. A slightly older version is available as CMPO Working Paper 06/150 {to rise again}

Revise & Resubmit

• Do Remote Workers Deter Neighborhood Crime? Evidence from the Rise of Working from Home [April 2026], joint with Jesse Matheson, James Rockey, and Argyris Sakalis [2nd round R&R, Review of Economic Studies]
  media: [NYT] [guardian]

The Language of Punishment: Reluctant Bureaucrats, Public Morality, and the Law [December 2025], joint with Isaac Dalke [R&R American Journal of Sociology]

Journal Articles

• More Powerful Cluster Randomized Control Trials [2026], joint with Marcos Vera-Hernández Economic Development and Cultural Change vol. 74(4), 1411–1436 (2026)
  Companion R package for the project: Optimal.sample


• Going Beyond Simple Sample Size Calculations: a Practitioner's Guide [2025], joint with Marcos Vera-Hernández
  Fiscal Studies vol. 46, 323–348 (2025)


• How do Parole Boards Respond to Large, Societal Shocks? Evidence from the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks [2024], joint with Kegon Teng Kok Tan and Mariyana Zapryanova
  Journal of Public Economics vol. 238, (2024)


• Contagious Animosity in the Field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System [2021] , joint with Imran Rasul
  Journal of Labor Economics vol. 39, 739-85, (2021)


• Racial and Ethnic Sentencing Differentials in the Federal Criminal Justice System [2018], joint with Imran Rasul
  AEA Papers and Proceedings vol. 108, 241-245 (2018)


• Crime and the Depenalization of Cannabis: Evidence from a Policing Experiment [2014], joint with Jérôme Adda and Imran Rasul
  Journal of Political Economy vol. 122(5), 1130-1202 (2014)
  View a short film made about the paper


• Modelling the Effect of Pupil Mobility on School Differences in Educational Achievement, joint with Simon Burgess and Harvey Goldstein
  Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, vol. 127(4), 941-954 (2007)


• Girls Rock, Boys Roll: An Analysis of the Age 14-16 Gender Gap in English Schools, joint with Simon Burgess, Carol Propper, and Deborah Wilson,
  Scottish Journal of Political Economy, vol. 51(2), 209-229 (2004)

Book Chapters

• The Impact of School Choice on Sorting by Ability and Socio-Economic Factors in English Secondary Education, joint with Simon Burgess, Carol Propper and Deborah Wilson
  Schools and the Equal Opportunity Problem, MIT Press (2007). ISBN-13: 978-0-262-23257-9

/now

Reading: halfway through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Making better work if it on this second attempt. Pretty shocked at Wallace's creativity. E-reading this lowers the friction of the endless endnotes.
Riding: still thinking of switching out the drop bars for a flat setup on my gravel bar, still not done it.
Doing: walking in the woods with the pups
Cooking: still loving Madhur Jaffrey
Listening to: juggling the Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey.

contact

email: brendon dot mcconnell at city dot ac dot uk