Steven Raphael

Steven Raphael is the Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE). He is a Professor of Public Policy 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 research over the past decade has focused on evaluating criminal justice reform and studying race disparities in criminal justice involvement. Current projects focus on race disparities in police stop outcomes and arrest, the effect of gun control policy on homicide, and research involving various efforts to reduce pretrial detention. Most of his prior work in this area focused on the employment and reentry problems faced by the formerly incarcerated and understanding growth in the U.S. prison population.

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 a 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.  He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley.