Overview
Michael Mueller-Smith is an economist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, specializing in criminal justice economics, labor economics, and the use of large-scale administrative records to study how the criminal justice system affects individual outcomes. He is the principal developer of CJARS (Criminal Justice Administrative Records System), a nationwide dataset linking criminal justice records from approximately 50% of the US population.
Key Contributions / Features
- CJARS (Finlay and Mueller-Smith 2021a): Criminal Justice Administrative Records System. A nationwide criminal justice administrative data infrastructure covering ~50% of the US population, constructed by linking court, prosecution, and correctional records across states via exact name+DOB+state matching. The dataset enables large-scale causal inference on criminal justice outcomes by matching administrative crime records to survey and program data. See Deshpande and Mueller-Smith 2022 — Does Welfare Prevent Crime The Criminal Justice Outcomes of Youth Removed from SSI.
- Deshpande and Mueller-Smith (2022): "Does Welfare Prevent Crime? The Criminal Justice Outcomes of Youth Removed from SSI." Using the PRWORA 1996 age-18 redetermination RD design (same as Deshpande 2016b), linked to CJARS, finds that SSI removal increases total charges by 22.7%, income-generating charges by 60.8%, and annual incarceration likelihood by 61.7%. MVPF of SSI = 5.6 (without victim costs) to 16.1 (with victim costs). See SSI Children's Program and Causal Effects of DI Receipt.
- Mueller-Smith (2015): "The Criminal and Labor Market Impacts of Incarceration." Documents the labor market consequences of incarceration using a prison sentencing RD design.
- Mueller-Smith and Schnepel (2021): "Diversion in the Criminal Justice System." Estimates the effect of pretrial diversion programs on recidivism and labor market outcomes.
- Gross and Mueller-Smith (2021): "The Health Costs of Criminal Justice Involvement." Documents mortality and health effects of incarceration using CJARS-linked data.
Related
Sources