The Impact of Criminal Financial Sanctions: A Multi-State Analysis of Survey and Administrative Data

By Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh and Michael Mueller-Smith

We estimate the impact of financial sanctions in the U.S. criminal justice system using nine distinct natural experiments across five states. These regression discontinuities capture a range of enforcement levels ($17–$6,000) and institutional environments, providing robust causal evidence and external validity. We leverage survey and administrative data to consider a variety of short and long-term outcomes including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, spousal spillovers, and other self-reported measures of well-being. We find consistent, robust evidence of precise null effects on the population, including ruling out long-run impacts larger than -$347–$168 in annual earnings and -0.002–0.01 in annual convictions. 

Unpublished paper, 2023. 60p.