Rate My Professor Steve Mello

Steve Mello is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College, with an area of expertise in public economics. He earned a B.A. in Economics with honors from Hamilton College in 2011, an M.A. in Economics from Princeton University in 2015, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2019. Prior to his appointment at Dartmouth in 2020, Mello held a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy from 2019 to 2020. Since 2020, he has been a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Mello's research interests encompass public economics and labor economics, with additional focus on poverty and inequality, crime, discrimination, and urban economics. His prominent publications include "Police Discretion and Public Safety" (with Felipe Goncalves), accepted in the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics; "Fines and Financial Wellbeing," forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies; "A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing" (with Felipe Goncalves), American Economic Review 111(5): 1406-41, May 2021; and "More COPS, Less Crime," Journal of Public Economics 172: 174-200, April 2019. He was awarded the 2023 Rees Dissertation Prize from Princeton University for his dissertation "Essays on Public Economics and Criminal Justice," shared with co-author Felipe Goncalves. Other honors include the Rockefeller-Haney Fellowship and Burke Research Initiation Award from Dartmouth College in 2023 and 2021, respectively, along with graduate fellowships such as the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship (2018-2019) and Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars (2017-2018). Mello has organized the Dartmouth Junior Brown Bag seminar (2021-2023; 2024-present), co-organized the Dartmouth Applied Micro Seminar (2021-2022), and serves on the program committee for the 2025 APPAM Research Conference. He regularly referees for top journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Journal of Political Economy.