It's not media magnification and it's not your imagination. Violent crime on the subways is up — particularly in a few troubling categories.

Machine learning can predict shooting victimization well enough to help prevent it. Just Accepted new paper by Sara B. Heller, Benjamin Jakubowski, Zubin Jelveh (Zubin Jelveh), and Max Kapustin zurl.co/urjHq

Striking new RCT from Marcella Alsan & Crystal Yang showing that requiring accredited healthcare providers reduces recidivism and mortality in US jails.

The next ViCE seminar is this Thursday, January 23, at 1pm ET. Austin Smith will present: "The Effect of Supervisors on Police Behavior" More info: jenniferdoleac.com/vice-seminar/

Passage of restrictions on firearms access in Oregon lead to a surge in gun demand and a net permanent increase in firearms, from Katie Bollman, Benjamin Hansen, @edrubin, and Garrett O. Stanford nber.org/papers/w33360

The great Aaron Chalfin provides a guide to what's in the issue in his introductory essay. vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime…

Sunday reading: “The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships” by Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, & Ning Zhang academic.oup.com/qje/article/13…

Come work for me The University of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute for Economics! I'm hiring a full-time pre-doc to start this April/May/June for data analysis on crime, education, mental health, and organized crime, mostly on projects in Latin America. Details and application here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/universityofch… Econ RA Listings

Tariffs are taxes. Tariffs are regressive taxes. Tariffs are distortionary, regressive taxes. Tariffs are distortionary, regressive taxes that raise prices for US businesses and consumers.

New Tax Foundation estimates on the Canada, Mexico, China tariffs reflecting the lower rate on Canadian energy. -Increase federal tax revenue by $1.1 trillion from 2025-2034 -Shrink US economic output by 0.4% -Reduce after-tax incomes by 0.8% conventionally and 1.1% dynamically

Very proud to be a part of the Vital City team that took the deepest dive yet into the problems of crime and disorder in the NYC subways, found that unpredictable assaults by strangers were at the heart of the problem, and devised a plan to reduce them. nytimes.com/2025/03/14/nyr…

Vital City exposes some particularly shoddy journalism that makes misleading claims about comparative safety of the NYC subway system. Subway assaults are up over the last 15 years but, to be clear, NYC public transit remains considerably safer than transit in peer cities.

Y’all, I wrote a book! The Science of Second Chances is based on my decades of work studying crime and criminal behavior, first as an economics professor and now as a policy expert at Arnold Ventures. It shares what we know from cutting-edge research about how to intervene at

Great piece by Brandon del Pozo in The Atlantic. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should ditch the face coverings and anonymity. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

I posted to CrimRxiv for the first time! crimrxiv.com/pub/fjv19vp1

The NYC subways have their issues but they are also probably one of the safer places to spend time in urban America.