Steven Raphael

Research Expertise and Interest

crime, public policy, employment discrimination, labor economics, racial inequality, urban economics, and criminal justice policy

Research Description

Steven Raphael is a Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and holds the James D. Marver Chair at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His research focuses on the economics of low-wage labor markets, housing, and the economics of crime and corrections.  His most recent research focuses on the social consequences of the large increases in U.S. incarceration rates and racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes.  Raphael also works on immigration policy, research questions pertaining to various aspects of racial inequality, the economics of labor unions, social insurance policies, homelessness, and low-income housing.  Raphael is the author (with Michael Stoll) of Why Are so Many Americans in Prison? (published by the Russell Sage Foundation Press) and The New Scarlet Letter? Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record (published by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research).  Raphael is research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the California Policy Lab, the  University of Michigan National Poverty Center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, IZA, Bonn Germany, and the Public Policy Institute of California.  Raphael holds a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley.

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
October 5, 2020

Cal Professors Lead Poverty Study

San Francisco Chronicle
Bay City News Service
Three University of California, Berkeley professors will lead the work to create new datasets to better understand poverty and mobility with the help of a $2 million grant. "By constructing these datasets and making them available to a wide array of researchers, we will unlock a generation's worth of new policy research," said professor Jesse Rothstein, co-lead researcher on the project, in a statement. Also leading the project are professors Hilary Hoynes and Steven Raphael. Researchers throughout the University of California system and others will take part in the work.
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December 5, 2018

San Francisco auto break-ins: UC study finds police foot patrols helped decrease larceny crimes

San Francisco Chronicle
Evan Sernoffsky
Thefts and assaults in San Francisco have declined significantly since the San Francisco Police Department made the strategic decision to reassign dozens of officers to walk neighborhood beats, according to a study co-authored by public policy professor Steven Raphael and doctoral public policy and biostatistics student Maura Lievano, also a research fellow at the California Policy Lab, a joint venture of UC Berkeley and UCLA. The reassignment of 69 officers to foot patrols was made on Sept. 1, 2017, and in the following four months, larceny theft, including vehicle break-ins, dropped nearly 17 percent, and assaults declined 19 percent. The researchers credit the new strategy for contributing to the theft and assault drops, but found no impact on other frequently reported crime categories, including robbery, burglary, and drug offenses. They measured the crime data while controlling for variables that were unrelated to the shift in staffing.
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