California Policy Lab

In 2014, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began a demonstration of theEnhanced Drug and Contraband Interdiction Program at 11 prisons in California. Using data provided bythe Department, this study finds that the intensive version of the program yielded a 23% decline in failurerates of random drug tests over the period studied, and a reduction in the number of cellphone violations,but that these same institutions experienced increased levels of drug-related rules violations. Themoderate program had no discernable impact on drug abuse in the prisons in which it was tested.

The federal and state Earned Income Tax Credits can provide a significant financial boost to low-income Californians. However, there is concern that some eligible Californians are missing out on these credits, and this report summarizes a two-year effort to increase the number of eligible Californians who claim the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs), which can provide a significant financial boost to low-income families.

In a series of randomized trials, more than one million Californians received text messages and letters designed to inform them about the credits. Although some people engaged with online resources about the EITC shared in the texts and letters, these efforts had no effect on increasing the number of people who filed a tax return or claimed the EITCs, indicating that these additional, targeted outreach strategies were not enough to increase take-up of the EITCs amongst low-income households.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grant MRP-19-600774.

We evaluate the effect on reported daily criminal incidents of a sizable reallocation of police officers from plain clothes special-task force assignments to uniformed foot patrol.  On September 1st, 2017, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) re-assigned 69 officers (roughly 3.5 percent of sworn officers in the department) to various foot patrol assignments across the city’s ten police districts.  We use microlevel data on criminal incidents to generate daily counts of crime by broad category for the ten most frequently reported offenses (accounting for over 90 percent of incidents reported to the police) for the 120-day period surrounding the September 1st policy change.  We conduct an event study analysis to test for a discrete change in the daily level of criminal incidents coinciding in time with the reallocation of police officers.  We document discrete and statistically significant declines in the daily number of larceny thefts and assaults reported to the police coinciding with the increase in the number of officers assigned to foot-beats. We show that the observed declines are not evident for comparable time periods in earlier years.  The decline in larceny theft is geographically broad-based across police districts within the city while the decline in assaults is concentrated in a few districts.  We do not observe larger crime declines (either in absolute terms or proportional to pre-change crime levels) in districts that experienced greater increases in foot-beat assignments.

A sizable tax gap (taxes owed to California, but not reported) exists in California partly because some taxpayers may misrepresent self-reported elements on their return, such as their income and deductions to reduce their tax liability. Building off of previous research on honesty “nudges,” the California Policy Lab and California Franchise Tax Board, in partnership with a tax preparation software provider, conducted a randomized control trial to test the impact on tax filer behavior of presenting an honesty and accuracy nudge at the beginning of the tax preparation process. The nudge reminded taxpayers of their responsibility to complete the return accurately and honestly, and was intended to keep this responsibility in the forefront of their minds while completing returns. The nudge did not produce detectible changes in income reporting or taxes paid.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grant MRP-19-600774.

California needs a centralized authority for linking the state’s administrative data. Legislators are focusing on new datasets and data systems, which is a step in the right direction. But what the state truly needs is a new office with a clear mandate to link the state’s core data assets, a clear set of tools for doing so, and governance that ensures data are used to inform program improvement. Think of it as the state’s Census Bureau – or “Statistics  California.”

We propose here a roadmap toward that goal: (1) create a new, independent office with the mandate and expertise to link data across siloes, (2) sequence the linkage process by starting with education and expanding outward, and (3) establish streamlined governance that makes data available to improve state policies and programs.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grant MRP-19-600774.

Over 150,000 low- and moderate-income California high school graduates each year are eligible for CalGrant entitlement awards, which can cover full tuition and most fees at any of the three public higher education segments in the state, or can make substantial contributions toward tuition at private colleges. Unfortunately, many eligible students don’t take up the awards. Many may not be aware of their eligibility, know how to navigate the system, or feel like these funds are truly meant for them. In 2017-8, the California Policy Lab worked with the California Student Aid Commission to design and test more effective notifications to eligible high school seniors. The redesigned letters were clearer, shorter, and encouraged students to think of themselves as college-bound. The results were promising. Students who received the redesigned letters were much more likely to take the first step toward claiming the award than a randomly selected comparison group. Future analyses will measure impacts on college enrollment, CalGrant payouts, and eventual college completion.

The top one percent of arrestees in San Francisco (“high users”) account for approximately seven percent of all arrests. Property crimes, both felony and misdemeanor, are the most frequent charge in both high user arrests and cases filed by the District Attorney. High users are predominantly male and fall between 30 and 50 years old. African Americans, though 6% of San Francisco’s population, constitute almost 50% of the high user cohort. San Francisco’s high user cohort also faces significant economic insecurity: more than half accessed safety-net benefits from the Human Services Agency during the study period.

In the admissions cycle that began in November 2016, UC Berkeley carried out the second year of a pilot experiment with letters of recommendation. Unlike other highly selective universities, Berkeley has never previously asked applicants to submit letters from teachers and guidance counselors. This may limit the information available for use in holistic review, and some at Berkeley think that as the university gets more selective it is getting harder to make informed decisions with the evidence available. Others, however, are concerned that students from disadvantaged backgrounds may not have access to adults who can write strong letters, and that the use of letters will further disadvantage these students.

In the pilot experiment, a subset of applicants was invited to submit letters of recommendation if they wished. Any submitted letters were incorporated into the “second read” evaluations of their applications. I evaluate the impact of this on the outcomes of applicants from four groups underrepresented among successful applicants to Berkeley: students from families with low incomes, students whose parents did not attend college, students from low-scoring high schools, and students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. I use a variety of methods, including a within-subject design that compares application scores when readers had access to letters with scores from a parallel process that suppressed the letters and a regression discontinuity design that exploits sharp distinctions between otherwise similar students in the selection of students to be invited to submit letters.

We found that the Permanent Supportive Housing program intervention was able to house 86 percent of chronically homeless adults randomized to the treatment group based on their high use of multiple systems who were randomized to the treatment group. On average, it took 2.5 months for participants randomized to housing to become housed and 70 percent moved at least once, demonstrating that PSH can be successful with high‐risk participants but requires time and flexibility.

By using a randomized controlled trial design, we found that those randomized to housing (versus usual care) had lower use of psychiatric emergency departments and shelters, but did not have large reductions in service use described in previous uncontrolled studies.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grant MRP-19-600774.

Using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we find that attending a newly constructed school yields improvements in test scores, attendance, and teacher-reported measures of student effort. These results suggest attending a newly constructed school for four years can eliminate almost half of the math achievement gap between LAUSD students and the state average, and almost 20% of the English gap.