Aaron Chalfin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research affiliate at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
His current research focuses on the costs and benefits of policing, the preferences of police officers, place-based crime prevention, and the determinants of crime victimization. He is also interested in research that advances 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. In the past, he has written on immigration enforcement, capital punishment, and several other topics.
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.
