An Empirical Evaluation of the Impact of New York's Bail Reform on Crime Using Synthetic Controls

This is the raw data compiled for the project, "An Empirical Evaluation of the Impact of New York's Bail Reform on Crime Using Synthetic Controls"Abstract: We conduct an empirical evaluation of the impact of New York's bail reform on crime. New York State's Bail Elimination Act went into effect on January 1, 2020, eliminating money bail and pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants. Our analysis of effects on aggregate crime rates after the reform informs the understanding of bail reform and general deterrence. We conduct a synthetic control analysis for a comparative case study of impact of bail reform. We focus on synthetic control analysis of post-intervention changes in crime for assault, theft, burglary, robbery, and drug crimes, constructing a dataset from publicly reported crime data of 27 large municipalities. Our findings, including placebo checks and other robustness checks, show that for assault, theft, and drug crimes, there is no significant impact of bail reform on crime; for burglary and robbery, we similarly have null findings but the synthetic control is also more variable so these are deemed less conclusive.Code repository: https://github.com/angelamzhou/empirical-evaluation-nyc-bail-reform-synth-control

本数据集系为项目“利用合成控制对纽约州保释改革对犯罪影响的实证评估”所编制的原始数据。摘要如下：本研究对纽约州保释改革对犯罪的影响进行了实证评估。纽约州《保释废除法案》自2020年1月1日起生效，取消了几乎所有轻罪和非暴力重罪被告的保证金和预审拘留。我们对改革后犯罪率总体变化的分析，有助于加深对保释改革和一般威慑力的理解。本研究对保释改革的比较案例进行了合成控制分析。我们专注于干预后犯罪（包括攻击、盗窃、入室盗窃、抢劫和毒品犯罪）的合成控制分析，构建了一个包含27个大型城市公开报告的犯罪数据的数据库。我们的研究发现，包括安慰剂检验和其他稳健性检验，对于攻击、盗窃和毒品犯罪，保释改革对犯罪没有显著影响；对于入室盗窃和抢劫，我们同样没有发现显著影响，但合成控制的结果更为多变，因此这些发现被认为结论尚不充分。代码仓库：https://github.com/angelamzhou/empirical-evaluation-nyc-bail-reform-synth-control