Michael Laforest

Background

About Michael Laforest

I am a postdoctoral scholar of public and labor economics in the Criminal Justice Research Center at Penn State University. My research focuses on ways to improve criminal justice and education policy, leveraging quasi-experimental, experimental, and structural modeling methods. My work has recently been published in Nature, the Journal of Human Capital, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. I'm currently conducting my postdoctoral research remotely from Copenhagen, Denmark, in order to live to with my wife, Hannah Tucker, who is an assistant professor of business history at the Copenhagen Business School. My main postdoctoral research consists of three working papers on the causal effects of parole supervision (mechanisms, racial bias, and a reentry RCT). My criminal justice research portfolio also includes research on the effects of policing on crime (e.g, gang takedowns, community policing initiatives, focused deterrence, and officer arrest decisions), prison programming (e.g, the “Thinking for a Change” program), and crime prevention through environmental design (e.g, streetlighting and art initiatives). My education research portfolio includes research on the effects of different high school curricula for non-college bound students (e.g, career and technical education) and programs to help high school students that are well-behind grade level (e.g, two-on-one peer tutoring and education technology platforms). I hold a PhD in economics from the University of Virginia and a BS in economics & political science from the University of Michigan. Prior to my postdoctoral fellowship, I worked as a research director at the University of Chicago's Crime & Education Lab in New York, managing a combination of policy evaluations and technical assistance projects for several New York City government agencies.