Why Have Robberies Become Less Frequent but More Violent? (2009)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Although the incidence of robbery has declined sharply since the early 1990s, the proportion of robberies resulting in victim injury has increased and the rate of victim resistance has remained...
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Witness intimidation is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. It also involves significant strategic complexity and two-sided uncertainty: a criminal cannot know whether his threat will...
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Witness intimidation is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. It also involves significant strategic complexity and two-sided uncertainty: a criminal cannot know whether his threat will...
Peaceable kingdoms and war zones: Pre-emption, ballistics and murder in Newark (2007)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Between 2000 and 2006 the murder rate in Newark doubled while the national rate remained essentially constant. Newark now has eight times as many murders per capita than the nation as a whole....
Peaceable kingdoms and war zones: Pre-emption, ballistics and murder in Newark (2007)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Between 2000 and 2006 the murder rate in Newark doubled while the national rate remained essentially constant. Newark now has eight times as many murders per capita than the nation as a whole....
Racial stereotypes and robbery (2004)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial...
Racial stereotypes and robbery (2004)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial...
Do housing and social policies make households too small? Evidence from New York (2002)
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, O'Flaherty, Brendan
How many adults should live in a house? How do people actually divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In New York...
Do housing and social policies make households too small? Evidence from New York (2002)
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, O'Flaherty, Brendan
How many adults should live in a house? How do people actually divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In New York...
"Causes" of homelessness: Understanding city- and individual-level data (2002)
Studies of homelessness that use city-level observations get systematically different results from studies that use individual-level data. I explain why. The findings are consistent with a model of...
"Causes" of homelessness: Understanding city- and individual-level data (2002)
Studies of homelessness that use city-level observations get systematically different results from studies that use individual-level data. I explain why. The findings are consistent with a model of...
Apes, essences, and races: What natural scientists believed about human variation, 1700-1900 (2002)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Shapiro, Jill S.
Scientific views on human variation and the relationship between humans and apes changed dramatically between 1700-1900. This paper traces the history of those changes from an initial consensus on...
Turnover reflects specific training better than wages do (2002)
Munasinghe, Lalith, O'Flaherty, Brendan
Turnover falls with tenure -- this is one of the best established empirical regularities of labor economics -- but finding a tenure effect on wages seems to be very hard. Within-job wage cuts do not...
Apes, essences, and races: What natural scientists believed about human variation, 1700-1900 (2002)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Shapiro, Jill S.
Scientific views on human variation and the relationship between humans and apes changed dramatically between 1700-1900. This paper traces the history of those changes from an initial consensus on...
Turnover reflects specific training better than wages do (2002)
Munasinghe, Lalith, O'Flaherty, Brendan
Turnover falls with tenure - this is one of the best established empirical regularities of labor economics - but finding a tenure effect on wages seems to be very hard. Within-job wage cuts do not...
Coddling Fatalistic Criminals: A Dynamic Stochastic Analysis of Criminal Decision-Making (1997)
Decision makers who confront a long sequence of criminal opportunities act differently from those who confront a single opportunity. If the sequence is long enough, people will take big chances in...
The Form of U.S. In-Kind Assistance (1996)
Child care and housing programs in the U.S. are marked by quality homogeneity, restricted eligibility, rationing, and co-payments that increase as recipients' income rises. Why? I show that these...
When and How to Live: Resolving Non-Contractible Uncertainty Efficiently (1996)
Some contracts (academic employment, for instance) carry voting rights on some issues and other contracts do not (health club memberships). Voting is one way of resolving noncontractible uncertainty;...
Short Ballots: Why Mayors are in Charge of So Many Different Things (1995)
When the same group of voters want to have a number of different tasks performed, but can observe performance only imperfectly, the best way to do so is to bundle the tasks together and hold a single...
Big-city governments are a fact of American life. Over 7.3 million people live in the 309 square miles in which New York City’s government provides municipal services, and in 1989 74% of American...
Measuring the Incentive to be Homeless (1994)
Cragg, Michael Ian, O'Flaherty, Brendan
We study the incentives to enter and to leave homeless shelters. After 2 years of decline, the number of homeless families in new York city's shelters system began rising again in spring 1990 and...
Less Crime May Be Worse (1993)
The probability of being a crime victim, conditional on engaging in risky activity, acts like a tax on the risky activity. The higher the probability, the greater the loss to potential victims in...
Will Free Trade With Political Science Put Normative Economists Out of Work? (1993)
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Bhagwati, Jagdish
We resolve the determinacy paradox.
Burn-Outs: Fire Victims in North Jersey, the Red Cross, and the Housing Market (1992)
Poor families who became fire victims in North Jersey between 1987 and 1991 generally found housing quickly, but had to pay a lot more rent. However, a substantial number could not be located after...
This paper was presented at the conference "Policies to Promote Affordable Housing," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and...
Globalization and the Rate of Technological Progress: What Track and Field Records Show
Lalith Munasinghe, Brendan O'Flaherty, Stephan Danninger
The past century and a quarter has seen frequent improvements in track and field records. We attempt to estimate what proportion of the speed of record breaking is due to globalization (competitors...
Specific Training Sometimes Cuts Wages and Always Cuts Turnover
Lalith Munasinghe, Brendan O'Flaherty
Turnover falls with tenure, but wages do not always rise (and sometimes fall) with tenure. We reconcile these findings by revisiting an old issue: how gains from firm-specific training are split...
Do housing and social policies make households too small? Evidence from New York
Ingrid Gould Ellen, Brendan O'Flaherty
How many adults should live in a house? How do people actually divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In New York...
Turnover reflects specific training better than wages do
Lalith Munasinghe, Brendan O'Flaherty
Turnover falls with tenure ¡ª this is one of the best established empirical regularities of labor economics ¡ª but finding a tenure effect on wages seems to be very hard. Within-job wage cuts do...
"Causes" of homelessness: Understanding city- and individual-level data
Studies of homelessness that use city-level observations get systematically different results from studies that use individual-level data. I explain why. The findings are consistent with a model of...
Apes, essences, and races: What natural scientists believed about human variation, 1700-1900
Brendan O'Flaherty, Jill S. Shapiro
Scientific views on human variation and the relationship between humans and apes changed dramatically between 1700-1900. This paper traces the history of those changes from an initial consensus on...
Practical politics; an economic analysis.
Thesis (A.B., Honors)--Harvard University, 1973.
Monopoly, local government, and distribution /
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1980.
Racial stereotypes and robbery
Brendan O'Flaherty, Rajiv Sethi
Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial...
Peaceable kingdoms and war zones: Pre-emption, ballistics and murder in Newark
Brendan O'Flaherty, Rajiv Sethi
Between 2000 and 2006 the murder rate in Newark doubled while the national rate remained essentially constant. Newark now has eight times as many murders per capita than the nation as a whole....
Brendan O'Flaherty, Rajiv Sethi
Witness intimidation is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. It also involves significant strategic complexity and two-sided uncertainty: a criminal cannot know whether his threat will...
On the Job Screening, up or out Rules, and Firm Growth.
Brendan O'Flaherty, Aloysius Siow
This paper uses on-the-job screening to derive a stochastic and dynamic model of hiring, promotion, and dismissal policies, and their impact on total firm employment and output. The model provides an...
Why would any group want to have a decision-making body composed of representatives? The best answer is found in the "Anti-Federalist ideal" identified by Wood [1992]: if within-group benefits are...
Decision makers who confront a long sequence of criminal opportunities act differently from those who confront a single opportunity. If the sequence is long enough, people will take big chances in...
The Form of U.S. In-Kind Assistance.
Child care and housing programs in the United States are marked by quality homogeneity, restricted eligibility, rationing, and copayments that increase as recipients' income rises. Why? I show that...
Yinghua He, Brendan O'Flaherty, Robert A.Rosenheck
Most single adults share housing with other adults, and living alone is considerably more expensive than living with someone else. Yet policies that discourage shared housing for formerly homeless...
Up-or-Out Rules in the Market for Lawyers.
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Siow, Aloysius
The authors examine how up-or-out rules operate as a screening device in the market for lawyers. Using data on large New York law firms, they show that firm growth is a slow and uncertain process...
Racial stereotypes and robbery
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Robbery is a serious, widespread and sometimes violent crime resulting each year in costs to victims of several billion dollars. Data on the incidence of robbery reveals certain striking racial...
O'Flaherty, Brendan, Sethi, Rajiv
Metropolitan areas in the United States are characterized by both geographic concentration in robbery rates, and racial segregation in residential patterns. We argue that these two phenomena are...
Needle Sharing and HIV Transmission: A Model with Markets and Purposive Behavior
Ajay Mahal, Brendan O'Flaherty, David E. Bloom
Without well designed empirical studies, mathematical models are an important way to use data on needle infection for inferences about human infection. We develop a model with explicit behavioral...
When should homeless families get subsidized apartments? A theoretical inquiry
How and when should operators of homeless shelters place families from these shelters into subsidized housing? I apply the tools of contract theory to this problem, especially some approaches that...