Aaron Chalfin is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research affiliate at the University of Chicago Crime Lab where he previously spent two years as Research Director of the Crime Lab’s NYC office.
Aaron’s research focuses on the costs and benefits of policing, the preferences of police officers, place-based crime prevention and the determinants of crime victimization. Recent topics he has studied include the impact of expanding and contracting the size of municipal police departments in the United States, the effects of gang enforcement on community violence and the effects of municipal investments in street lighting on public safety. He is also interested in the advancement of social science research methods and has written on topics such as measurement errors in observational data, measuring spatial crime concentration and the empirical implications of administrative data linking.
Aaron’s research has been published in leading journals in criminology, public policy and economics including the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and American Economic Review: Insights.
Aaron holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in International and Development Economics from Yale University. He is also an alumnus of the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center where he worked as a research associate from 2006-2008.
Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment of Street Lighting in New York City
Academic paper featuring evidence from a randomized experiment of street lighting in New York City.
Gun Violence in Chicago, 2016
New York State Gun Violence Reduction Program
In partnership with New York State criminal justice agencies and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the Crime Lab is evaluating the impact of “reentry forums” on recidivism rates across the state of New York.
Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design
In partnership with New York City government agencies, the Crime Lab designed a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of street lighting on crime rates in public housing developments.
