David S. Abrams and Jonathan H. Choi · Working paper (2026)
This paper shows that large language models can accurately assess the legality of police stops, enabling scalable monitoring of police conduct and large-scale social science analysis of stop practices.
David S. Abrams and Priyanka Goonetilleke · U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 26-01 (2026)
Aggregating over 8 million pedestrian and vehicle stops from 16 U.S. cities, this paper documents enormous cross-city variation in stop-and-frisk practices, low and uneven contraband hit rates, and persistent racial disparities, pointing to large potential gains from shared standards and national data collection.
David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang, Priyanka Goonetilleke · NBER Working Paper No. w31594 (2023)
Exploiting the COVID-19 onset and the 2020 protests as natural experiments, the paper finds that contraband hit rates from stops and frisks rose as stop volumes fell, providing empirical support for optimizing models of police behavior.
David S. Abrams, Ufuk Akcigit, Jillian Grennan · NBER Working Paper No. w19647 (2025)
Using novel revenue data on patents held by non-practicing entities, this paper documents an inverted-U relationship between citations and patent value and develops a model in which productive and strategic patenting jointly drive observed citation patterns.
David S. Abrams and Bhaven N. Sampat · Working paper (2025)
Linking pharmaceutical patents to multiple measures of drug value, this paper finds that patent citations correlate most strongly with technological impact, more weakly with private value, and unevenly with social value—and that examiner-added citations tend to be less informative than applicant citations.
David S. Abrams, Ufuk Akcigit, Gokhan Oz, Jeremy G. Pearce · NBER Working Paper No. w25713 (2019)
Combining new theory with proprietary NPE patent and financial data, this paper shows that non-practicing entities tend to acquire patents from small, litigation-prone firms; downstream innovation falls in fields where NPEs acquire patents; and the net innovation effect of NPEs depends on the share of infringements coming from non-innovating producers.
David S. Abrams, Viet Nguyen, Aurelie Ouss, Julia Reinhold · Journal of Legal Studies (2026) · Published
Using data on initial plea offers in Philadelphia felony cases, this paper shows that rejected offers are often longer than eventual sentences, even after trial convictions. The findings challenge standard empirical approaches to measuring the trial penalty and show that relying on accepted pleas as counterfactuals can misstate both the magnitude and direction of the trial penalty.
David S. Abrams and Priyanka Goonetilleke · American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings (2026) · Published
A comparative look at stop-and-frisk practices across jurisdictions. The paper brings together evidence from multiple places to show how frisk rates, hit rates, and enforcement patterns vary tremendously across local policing environments.
David S. Abrams, Brian Collopy, Aurelie Ouss, Megan Stevenson, Colin D. Sullivan · American Criminal Law Review (2026) · Published
This field experiment examines why criminal justice institutions are often slow to adopt predictive tools. It focuses on the organizational and practical frictions that can keep potentially useful algorithms from moving into routine decision-making.
David S. Abrams and Tom Baker · Utah Law Review (2025) · Published
Many litigation funding agreements use “waterfall” payout structures in which funders are repaid first and plaintiffs receive only residual recoveries. This article argues that such arrangements place too much risk on plaintiffs, who are often least able to bear it. Using a simple economic model, the paper explains why more equity-like funding arrangements may better align incentives and improve outcomes for litigants while preserving access to justice.
David S. Abrams and Priyanka Goonetilleke · NYU Law Review (2025) · Published
Using a natural experiment in Philadelphia, this Article examines whether increasing continuity of representation in public defense improves outcomes for criminal defendants. The results show no evidence of improvements in conviction or sentencing outcomes, complicating the conventional preference for vertical representation.
David Abrams, Roberto Galbiati, Emeric Henry, Arnaud Philippe · The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (2023) · Published
This paper shows that sentencing can become harsher as judicial elections approach. It links electoral incentives to measurable changes in punishment and offers new evidence on how accountability pressures shape judicial behavior.
David Abrams, Roberto Galbiati, Emeric Henry, Arnaud Philippe · Journal of the European Economic Association (2022) · Published
This paper studies how judges adapt after rotating into new places with different sentencing cultures. It shows that local norms matter and that judges respond to those norms in systematic ways.
David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang, Priyanka Goonetilleke · American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings (2022) · Published
Using the decline in Chicago police frisks after the 2020 George Floyd protests, this paper shows that contraband hit rates rose as frisk rates fell, providing empirical evidence of diminishing marginal returns to pedestrian frisks - a central prediction of most economic models of policing.
David S. Abrams · Journal of Public Economics (2021) · Published
This paper uses police data from 25 large U.S. cities to estimate the immediate effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime. It documents sharp declines in many reported offenses and arrests—especially drug offenses, theft, residential burglary, and most violent crimes—while finding no comparable decline in homicides and shootings and increases in some crimes involving less-occupied property.
David S. Abrams · Loyola University Chicago Law Journal (2015) · Published
This Essay connects legal and economic approaches to stop-and-frisk policing, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded analysis of both the practice’s effectiveness and its constitutional limits.
David S. Abrams · Empirical Legal Analysis: Assessing the Performance of Legal Institutions (2014) · Book chapter
This chapter examines how empirical evidence on general deterrence, specific deterrence, and incapacitation can inform sentencing policy. It argues that incarceration decisions should be evaluated through a cost-benefit framework that accounts for both crime reduction and the social costs of imprisonment.
David S. Abrams · Iowa Law Review (2013) · Published
A cost-benefit framework for thinking about incarceration policy. The article balances deterrence, incapacitation, and social costs to ask how much imprisonment is justified.
David S. Abrams · Duquesne Law Review (2013) · Published
This Article argues that much of the perceived trial penalty reflects confusion between conditional and unconditional expected sentences, and presents evidence challenging the conventional account.
David S. Abrams and R. Polk Wagner · Stanford Law Review (2013) · Published
Using the Canadian transition to a first-to-file patent system, this article estimates the likely effects of the America Invents Act on individual inventors. The results indicate that first-to-file rules reduce individual inventors’ share of patenting without measurable improvements in patent quality.
David S. Abrams and Daniel L. Chen · Journal of Business Law (2013) · Published
One of the first empirical studies of the market for third-party litigation funding. It analyzes how this financing channel operates and what its emergence means for access to courts and litigation incentives.
David S. Abrams · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2012) · Published
Using state add-on gun laws as natural experiments, this Article separates incapacitation from deterrence and finds evidence longer sentences deter crime.
David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan · Journal of Legal Studies (2012) · Published
Using random assignment of felony cases to judges, this Article finds significant variation across judges in racial disparities in incarceration decisions.
David S. Abrams and Chris Rohlfs · Economic Inquiry (2011) · Published
Using experimental variation in bail, this paper studies how people value pretrial freedom and how bail policy should be designed.
David S. Abrams · Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2011) · Published
This paper reconsiders the standard view that pleading is necessarily beneficial to defendants. It asks whether the observed gap between plea and trial outcomes actually reflects a bargain in any meaningful sense.
David S. Abrams · University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2009) · Published
This Article uses the TRIPS-induced change in patent duration to estimate whether longer patent terms increase innovation.
David S. Abrams and Albert H. Yoon · University of Chicago Law Review (2007) · Published
Using random case assignment in a public defender office, this Article finds substantial variation in attorney performance and evidence that experience improves client outcomes.
For a complete list of papers, including drafts and earlier work, see the full SSRN author page.
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