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During the last decade, while national homicide rates have remained flat, New York City has experienced a second great crime decline, with gun violence declining by more than 50 percent since 2011. In this paper, we investigate one potential explanation for this dramatic and unexpected improvement in public safety—the New York Police Department's shift to a more surgical form of “precision policing,” in which law enforcement focuses resources on a small number of individuals who are thought to be the primary drivers of violence. We study New York City's campaign of “gang takedowns” in which suspected members of criminal gangs were arrested in highly coordinated raids and prosecuted on conspiracy charges. We show that gun violence in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one third in the first year after a gang takedown. Our estimates imply that gang takedowns explain nearly one quarter of the decline in gun violence in New York City's public housing communities over the last eight years.

* I present a dynamic structural model of individual choice regarding high school education curricula, post-secondary education attainment, and early labor market opportunities. I estimate the model to investigate the returns to education from different types of U.S. high school curricula, with a particular focus on career and technical education (CTE) for noncollege bound students. I estimate the model using panel data on students' high school course selection and labor market outcomes from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, and I account for high school curriculum self-selection by including instruments in the model for high school CTE and academic opportunities along with local labor market controls. The estimates suggest that, relative to general education courses, trade CTE courses improve a non-college bound student's later labor market wages and chance of being employed in a skilled occupation, while business CTE courses improve wages in low-wage / high-non-pecuniary utility occupations. In addition, the estimates suggest that increased CTE opportunities decrease a non-college bound student's propensity to drop out of high school but also that CTE courses decrease a high school graduate's likelihood to pursue a post-secondary education degree. Policy simulations suggest that incorporating vocational certification into high school CTE curricula would cause more students to take CTE courses and improve their labor market outcomes and that instituting a German-style high school tracking system in the United States would improve the education and labor market outcomes of high school graduates at the expense of their non-pecuniary utility in high school. Policy simulations also suggest that providing free tuition to community college would cause more students to take general education courses in high school, increase graduation from community colleges, slightly increase graduation from four-year colleges and universities, and slightly increase average wages in the population.

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