Are criminals strategic? Offender responses to drug sentencing cutoffs

In many US states, punishment severity for drug offenses increases discontinuously at established quantity limits. Theory predicts that these laws create bunching of offenders at these limits and dominated regions beyond, where it ex-ante appears irrational to locate. These policies provide a novel setting to test for deterrence along a different margin that typically considered in the literature and generate new evidence on the extent to which offenders respond to incentives. Using arrest reports from 28 states and leveraging variation from quantity cutoff changes through time, I find evidence of strategic bunching by offenders in response to cutoff policies.