J.J. Prescott’s research uses economic theory and empirical methods to study how legal institutions shape individual behavior, inequality, and population-level outcomes. His work focuses on settings in which formal legal rules—governing labor markets, criminal records, and access to courts—alter incentives, constraints, and information in ways that affect socioeconomic and related outcomes. Across projects, Prescott emphasizes careful institutional detail and credible empirical design, with particular attention to distinguishing true behavioral responses from changes driven by selection into legal processes, shifts in measurement or reporting, and variation in exposure to legal system contact itself.

A central area of Prescott’s research examines criminal records, punishment, and record relief, including expungement and sex offender registration and notification regimes. This work analyzes how criminal legal system contact operates as a persistent constraint on employment, housing, family stability, and social participation, and how relief from that contact alters subsequent economic and social outcomes. A key contribution of this research is showing how both the introduction of public registries and the removal of public criminal records affect behavior and outcomes, and that while public disclosure is often motivated by the intuition that access to information can reduce risk, these policies can also generate criminogenic effects by impeding reentry, distorting incentives, and amplifying social and economic exclusion, with important implications for reentry policy, information disclosure, and criminal justice design.

Another major strand of Prescott’s research focuses on employment regulation and labor market mobility, with particular attention to noncompete agreements and related contractual restraints. Much of this work is devoted to describing the constraints such agreements impose on workers and firms, and to documenting how beliefs about legal enforceability shape behavior. One important finding is that whether a restriction is legally enforceable often matters less than what affected workers believe about their obligations—beliefs that are frequently incomplete, inaccurate, or susceptible to manipulation through contractual form, workplace practices, and institutional context. More broadly, this research examines how legal and organizational environments help explain the prevalence and persistence of mobility-restricting provisions, with implications for labor market efficiency, inequality, and worker mobility.

Prescott also studies access to justice and the design of courts, particularly in high-volume settings. His research examines how court structure and technology shape litigant, prosecutor, and judicial behavior, affecting participation, charging and settlement decisions, compliance, and perceptions of fairness. A central theme of this work is how court technology—including online dispute resolution and digital court processes—alters transaction costs, information flows, and bargaining environments, with the potential both to exacerbate disparities across different classes of participants and to expand access by lowering barriers to participation and compliance. This research evaluates whether institutional and technological reforms can expand access and reduce inequality while preserving accuracy, legitimacy, and procedural justice. Prescott also contributes to a broader literature on litigation and dispute resolution, especially the dynamics of settlement, by developing theoretical and empirical accounts that reconceptualize settlement not as simple case dismissal for money, but as an integral part of the litigation process itself, with implications for how disputes are structured and resolved.

Prescott also serves as the Co-Director of the Empirical Legal Studies Center and Co-Director of the Program in Law and Economics.