Working Papers
Clark, Tom S., and John W. Patty. "Which Issues Should We Decide? Coalitions and Agenda Setting." (working paper)
The study of politics involves not just how the government decides questions but when it decides to act and on what subjects. We propose a model of collegial agenda-setting in which issues can be packaged together for resolution. We situate the model in the context of the US Supreme Court to investigate how collective choice and discretionary review interact to shape what problems get resolved. Our model yields novel insights into the ways in which cases can interact with each other to affect which cases are selected for review and the timing in when open questions are resolved.
Clark, Tom S. "A Model of Criminal Justice Discretion." (working paper)
Criminal prosecutors wield tremendous power in the American legal system. However, their ability to direct prosecution against criminal suspects relies on coordination with the police who investigate crimes and make arrests. That relationship has been made more prominent in the context of reform prosecutors who propose to shift traditional law-enforcement priorities. I propose a novel model of police-prosecutor interactions that focuses on the informational asymmetry between police and prosecutors. Police are endowed with private information about the true criminality of an arrested suspect but also have biases about prosecution and charges. I evaluate how prosecutors' preferences over leniency affect credible communication between police and prosecutors. Analysis of the model identifies empirical implications for the types of criminal suspects prosecuted, prosecutors' adoption of police charges, and the success rate for prosecutors who take cases to trial.
Clark, Tom S. "Coordinated Justice: The Politics of Prosecution and Policing." (working paper)
Criminal justice outcomes emerge from the coordinated actions of police and prosecutors, yet these institutions are typically studied in isolation. We lack a theoretical framework for understanding how the strategic incentives of police agencies and elected prosecutors interact to jointly determine enforcement patterns. This paper develops a game-theoretic model in which police choose evidence investment and enforcement allocation while prosecutors set evidentiary standards for charging. The analysis reveals a strategic complementarity between these choices that generates multiple equilibria, institutional path dependence, and electoral cycling in enforcement regimes. Identical formal policies can sustain sharply different enforcement environments depending on coordination history, and reforms that fail to account for this interdependence may produce null or heterogeneous effects. The framework yields direct implications for the empirical analysis of criminal justice reform, offering guidance for interpreting estimated reform effects.
Clark, Tom S. "Municipal Liability Insurance as Police Oversight: Evidence from Vallejo, California." (working paper)
Municipal liability routinely translates police misconduct into costs for local governments, yet we know little about whether liability's structure actually changes police behavior. This article studies one underappreciated mechanism: insurance. Private liability insurers can function as decentralized oversight because they price risk, impose deductibles, and provide risk-management services. When a city shifts from pooled risk-sharing to market-based coverage, the fiscal consequences of misconduct become sharper. I examine such a transition in Vallejo, California, which in 2018 left a municipal risk pool after high police liabilities and obtained market-based coverage. Using a generalized synthetic control design with monthly California data, I estimate that Vallejo's violent-crime clearances rose substantially, stabilizing at roughly 30 additional clearances per month relative to the synthetic counterfactual — on the order of a near doubling of the pre-treatment rate. This evidence suggests a shift in resources towards activities that increase the rate of crime solving, supporting the expectation that liability institutions shape ex ante incentives inside public bureaucracies, not merely compensate victims.
Clark, Tom S., and John W. Patty. "Managing Intractable Problems." (working paper)
Intractable problems are inherent to governance and politics. A problem is "intractable" if it is not only difficult to agree on a solution, but also difficult to agree on what a potential solution will lead to. Intractable problems are characterized by broad and persistent low public satisfaction. We introduce two related, but distinct, notions of why reform might be pursued in a political system: complexity and complicatedness. Complexity centers on the difficulty of understanding the problem itself, and complicatedness focuses on the difficulty of making accurate decisions to mitigate the problem. We also consider how these notions are caused and/or ameliorated by having an "outsider" reconfigure the decision process, and how their presence affects the potential costs and benefits of reform by an outsider.