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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020 (Revised June 2020)

  Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States

  Reshmaan N. Hussam and Holly Fetter

  The late 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the criminal justice system of the United States. While incarceration rates had remained stable through the 1960s, they quintupled by the 2000s to 707 per 100,000, far exceeding that of all other nations in the world. By 2020, nearly 2.3 million individuals were locked up in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. Of these, 60% were Black or Latinx. Why the mass incarceration, and why such disparities by race? Were they responses to recent political and economic shifts, or part of a deeper social and cultural history? And what could be done to address what was now widely recognized by policymakers as a crisis of the criminal justice system in the United States?

  Keywords: criminal justice system; incarceration; Race; Prejudice and Bias; United States;

  Citation:

  Hussam, Reshmaan N., and Holly Fetter. "Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States." Harvard Business School Case 720-034, April 2020. (Revised June 2020.)  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field

  Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth

  Microentrepreneurs in low-income countries have widely varying marginal returns to capital, yet identifying those with the best opportunities remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the average marginal return to capital in our sample is 11% per month, microentrepreneurs reported to be in the top third of the community are estimated to have marginal return to capital between 23% and 35% per month. We cannot reject that microentrepreneurs ranked in the middle and bottom terciles of the community have a marginal return to capital of zero. Further we find evidence that community members distort their predictions when they can influence the distribution of resources. Finally we demonstrate that appropriately designed elicitation mechanisms can realign incentives for truthful reporting. These methods may be useful for using community information to target resources in other contexts, especially when targeting based on predicted treatment effects or when community members may have incentives to distort their predictions.

  Keywords: microentrepreneurs; community information; reporting; Entrepreneurship; Developing Countries and Economies; Information;

  Citation:

  Hussam, Reshmaan, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth. "Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-082, January 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2019

  Creating Accountability in Afghanistan

  Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos, Eugene F. Soltes and Grace Liu

  By early 2019, the United States had contributed $132 billion to the Afghan reconstruction. John Sopko, in his role as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), was in charge of providing accountability for U.S. aid funding. Sopko’s oversight faced severe limitations such as a growing on-budget assistance, pervasive corruption, and lack of transportation, infrastructure, and security for his staff. To fight those odds, SIGAR has implemented multiple strategies with relative success. For example, cultivating a network of sources and informants had allowed SIGAR to save the U.S. over $200 million from a fuel contract bid-rigging scheme. The SIGAR Fraud Hotline had received and reviewed over 3,200 reports. However, with the Afghan presidential elections and peace talks looming on the horizon, Sopko was wondering how SIGAR would have to adapt to a new reality that could potentially be much worse.

  Keywords: auditing; fraud; accountability; Crime and Corruption; Law Enforcement; Governance; Infrastructure; Information; Networks; Strategy; Afghanistan;

  Citation:

  Heese, Jonas, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos, Eugene F. Soltes, and Grace Liu. "Creating Accountability in Afghanistan." Harvard Business School Case 120-024, August 2019.  View Details

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