Priscillia Hunt is an economist at the RAND Corporation, professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School, and a research fellow of the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Her research focuses on understanding the value of criminal justice-related policies in terms of impacts and economic and social costs & benefits. Currently, she is studying the public's preferences for punitiveness. To do this, she is conducting discrete choice experiments to estimate the public's willingness to pay for: counseling, community service, record-sealing, victim restitution, public accountability, and systems of apology or regret from defendants charged with their first "low-level" crime. Hunt has numerous studies on the effectiveness of police, court, and corrections strategies using experimental or quasi-experimental designs. She is currently conducting an RCT of restorative justice diversion to understand the impacts on criminal behavior, and a synthetic control study on the impact of police deflection. She completed a set of experiments incentivizing employers to hire people with a criminal record to understand the value of work history information and availability of replacement workers when needed. She also conducts studies to determine the costs of the criminal justice system. She was lead author of a study awarded Best Article in 2019 from the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis on the policing costs of reported crime, and another study on courts and legal service costs of reported crime. Hunt is a member of Criminal Justice Expert Panel (NYU Justice Tech Lab and Texas A&M). She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Warwick.
Selected Publications
Parast, L., P. Hunt, B.A. Griffin, D. Powell, "When Is a Match Sufficient? A Score-based Balance Metric for the Synthetic Control Method," Journal of Causal Inference, 8(1), 2021
Saunders, J., P. Hunt, and J. Hollywood, "Predictions Put Into Practice: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Chicago's Predictive Policing Pilot," Journal of Experimental Criminology, 12, 2016
P. Hunt, R. Smart, L. Jonsson, and F. Tsang , Breaking Down Barriers: Experiments into Policies That Might Incentivize Employers to Hire Ex-Offenders, RAND (RR-2142), 2018
Heaton, P., P. Hunt, J. Saunders, and J. MacDonald, "Short- and Long-Run Effects of Private Law Enforcement: Evidence from University Police," Journal of Law and Economics, 59(4), 2016
Hunt, P. and R. L. Pacula, "Early Impacts of Marijuana Legalization: An Evaluation of Prices in Colorado and Washington," Journal of Primary Prevention, 38(3), 2017
Hunt, P., J. Saunders, and B. Kilmer, "Estimates of Law Enforcement Costs by Crime Type for Benefit-Cost Analyses," Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 10(1), 2019
Hunt, P., J. Anderson, and J. Saunders, "The price of justice: New national and state-level estimates of the judicial and legal costs of crime to taxpayers," American Journal of Criminal Justice, 42, 2016
Yerushalmi, E., P. Hunt, S. Hoorens, C. Sauboin, and R. Smith, "Exploring the Use of a General Equilibrium Method to Assess the Value of a Malaria Vaccine: An Application to Ghana," Medical Decision Making Policy & Practice, 4(2), 2019
