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 Amanda Y. Agan is an American economist and assistant professor at Rutgers University Department of Economics, as well as a joint professor in the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interest lies in the Economics of Crime and Labor Economics.

Education and career
Amanda Y. Agan received her B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from George Mason University in 2006. She received her master’s degree in Economics from Chicago University in 2009. She completed her Ph.D. in economics from Chicago University in 2013 and worked at the Princeton University from 2013 to 2016. She was a visiting scholar of University of Pennsylvania from January 2016 to April 2016. She was also a visiting scholar of Becker Friedman Institute in May 2016. She worked as a visiting assistant professor at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research from August 2019 to June 2020. She has worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Economics and an affiliated professor of the program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, starting from September 2016. In addition, she is a faculty research fellow of National Bureau of Economic Research starting from May 2018. She is also a faculty affiliate of J-PAL North America starting from August 2018.

Research and academic work
Agan has authored or co-authored a number of publications in high-impact journals including Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies etc. Her Ph.D. research mainly focuses on the topic of sex offenses, and she later started her research at Rutgers probing into the interplay of criminal records, racial discrimination, employment, and wages.

Sex Offenses
Agan studied the association between sex offense victimization and the concentration of Registered Sex Offenders (RSOs) in various neighborhoods in Baltimore County, Maryland, and later discussed the effects of public knowledge of the identity and proximity of RSOs. During her work, she surprisingly found a counterintuitive fact that the areas with higher concentrations of RSOs are generally of lower risk in sex offense victimizations. However, a scrutiny into the public database in the Maryland’s registry that notifies the identity and proximity of RSOs, along with the case number in respective neighborhoods, she found that the public knowledge led to an increase in the risk of sex offenses.

Racial discrimination
In a recent publication, Agan examined the adverse effects caused by “Ban the Box” (a.k.a. BTB) policies which were at first introduced to try to extirpate the discrimination against those who more likely have criminal records— black men according to the work. However, Agan has proved by an experiment carried out in New Jersey and New York City which shows that BTB policies actually exacerbate the discrimination against the black community and led to a decrease in the likelihood of a black job applicant to get a callback during the application. She believes that it is due to the fact that the absence of reporting criminal records brought by the BTB policies actually causes the employers to exaggerate the association between the “real-world racial differences in felony conviction rates.”

Agan later (the publication is co-authored with Michael Makowsky and currently under review) looked into the impacts of minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) on the likelihood of released prisoners’ return to prison. She found out that an increase of $0.50 in minimum wage would directly associate with a 2.7% decrease in the possibility of an individual to return to prison in one year. It is reported that it is the increase in minimum wages and EITCs on recidivism that reduces the gap between the legal incomes and illegal incomes that plays an important role in whether the released prisoners would commit a crime and return to prison again.

Is your Lawyer a Lemon?
Agan’s recent work with the National Bureau of Economic Research examined administrative data from a county in Texas and gave explanations of the disparity in court outcomes for indigent clients— differing case characteristics, adverse selection of low-quality attorneys into assigned counsel, lower quality matches between attorneys and defendants, and reduced effort on the part of lawyers. Moreover, she mentioned in the work that,” Our results have important implications for policymakers seeking ways to provide a fair and accessible system of legal representation for those charged with [[crimes].”

2020
AEA Annual Meeting, University of California-Santa Cruz, Stanford-Labor Seminar, Harvard Inequality Seminar, Queens University, UC-Berkeley, Stanford-Law and Economics (Include scheduled).

2019
Rutgers-Newark Criminology, Georgia State University, Louisiana State University, Texas A&M Workshop on the Economics of Crime, University of Pennsylvania Law and Economics Seminar, Chicago-LSE Conference on the Economics of Crime, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, NBER Summer Institute Labor Studies, UIUC, Advances with Field Experiments, Stanford – Public Economics Seminar, Simon Fraser University, Atlanta Fed 10th Annual Employment Conference, George Mason Law, Georgetown Law, Santa Clara University.

2018
Brookings, NYU Wagner, NBER Labor Studies Spring Program Meeting, UT Austin Law and Economics, Bowdoin, UBC, UVA] [[Batten, National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice Workshop, Minnesota Fed OIGI Spring Conference, UCSD, CUNY-Hunter, University of Washington, University of Oregon, Transatlantic Workshop on the Economics of Crime, Rochester University, Clemson University, Brazilian Econometric Society Meetings.

2017
AEA Annual Meeting (organized P&P session), Harvard, MIT, Harvard Law, Waterloo Economics Workshop, SOLE Annual Meeting, IRP Summer Workshop.

2016
Rutgers University, SOLE Annual Meeting, ALEA Meeting, IRP Summer Workshop, NBER Summer Institutes Labor Studies/Crime, Advances with Field Experiments, 2016 Transatlantic Workshop on the Economics of Crime, UC Berkeley – Goldman, UC Santa Barbara (scheduled).

2015
ALEA Annual Meeting, University of Notre Dame.

2014
AEA Annual Meeting, AEFP Meeting, SOLE Annual Meeting, EALE Meeting.

2013
Purdue, Tufts, Cornell, Syracuse, Rochester, Toulouse, AERA Annual Meeting (poster), SOLE Annual Meeting, IRP Summer Research Workshop, NBER Summer Institute: Crime Working Group, CELS 2013, Princeton University, Teachers College-Columbia University.