Victor Kilanko, PhD

About Victor

"The highest calling of a social scientist is not to describe the world as it is, but to help build the world as it should be."

Most institutions were built with good intentions. Prisons were meant to rehabilitate. Hospitals were meant to heal. Regulatory agencies were meant to protect.

The data tell a different story.

Victor Kilanko, PhD is an Economist at the Cicero Institute, one of America's leading policy think tanks, whose research follows a single thread across sectors: how vested interests capture the institutions built to serve ordinary people, and what that capture costs in lives, dollars, and human potential. This is the political economy of institutional capture, and it is the unifying question behind everything he does.

To answer that question, Victor conducts deep, rigorous empirical research using the full arsenal of modern causal inference — difference-in-differences, synthetic control, instrumental variables, and doubly robust estimation — to isolate cause and effect where others can only observe correlation. Across the United States, he traces whether private prison capacity drives incarceration independent of actual crime. In California, he measures how psychedelic decriminalization has reshaped local crime. In healthcare, he investigates whether Medicaid expansion altered the charitable mission of nonprofit hospitals. The sectors differ. The mechanism — concentrated interests bending public institutions away from their purpose — remains the same.

To make these invisible mechanisms legible beyond academic journals, Victor built catviz, a causal inference visualization framework and freely available R package on CRAN, that translates complex identification strategies into something policymakers can act on.

He holds a PhD in Economics from Claremont Graduate University, trained across two continents, and has reviewed for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

His conviction is simple: the world does not have to be this way. The data prove it.

Research

Working Papers

Victor's research program targets the three systems that most directly determine whether a person thrives or is trapped: public safety, public health, and public prosperity. Every paper is designed to be published in a top journal and actionable enough to be enacted into policy.

Working Paper · Criminal Justice

The Impact of Psychedelic Reforms on Crime Rates in California

"When police stop enforcing victimless drug laws, crime actually falls."

Using data from 289 California cities across seven years, this study finds that psychedelic decriminalization reduced property crime by 7–10 percent. Not because drugs became legal, but because officers could redirect time toward crimes that actually harm people. Larceny, vehicle theft, and burglary all fell. Violent crime was unaffected. Every low-yield arrest is time not spent on a real crime.

Methods: PPSCM · CSDiD · Sun–Abraham · ASCM

Working Paper · Criminal Justice

The Effect of Privatization on Prison Populations: Evidence from Mississippi

"Private prisons don't just house inmates — they create demand for them."

When Mississippi introduced private prison capacity in 1996, incarceration rose 23 percent — without any corresponding increase in crime. This paper provides the first causal estimates of what private prison entry does to state incarceration. The Mississippi picture is precise: supply-side prison capacity raises incarceration independently of criminal activity. The system, once built, fills itself.

Methods: CSDiD · PPSCM · ASCM · with Ryan Quandt & Cameron Milani

Working Paper · Healthcare

Mission or Margin? Medicaid Expansion and Uncompensated Care in Hospitals

"Nonprofit hospitals promised charity. The data ask whether they delivered it."

Nonprofit hospitals receive billions in annual tax exemptions on the promise they serve communities above commercial interests. Medicaid expansion provides the natural experiment to test that promise. Both nonprofit and for-profit hospitals reduced charity care sharply (~40%) post-expansion. The nonprofit mission advantage is narrower and more conditional than the policy justification for tax exemption implies.

Methods: DR-DiD · DDD · CSDiD · with Ryan Quandt & Elena Gonzalez

Methods Paper · Econometrics

Causal Assignment Trees: A Unified Visual Framework for DiD Identification

"Making the logic of causal inference visible to every researcher — and every policymaker."

The most powerful tools in empirical economics are also the most opaque. This paper introduces the Causal Assignment Tree (CAT) — a formal, visual framework that makes the counterfactual structure of DiD, CSDiD, and DDD designs explicit and transparent. Implemented as the open-source R package catviz on CRAN, adopted by researchers across economics, public health, and political science.

Package: catviz on CRAN · R · Open Source

Also in Progress

Does Low-Barrier Housing Policy Increase Crime? Evidence from Chicago Emergency Shelters (HUD HEARTH Act, 53 shelters, 2001–2023)
Risk-Adjusted Premiums and Gun Harm Reduction: Evaluating San Jose's Firearm Insurance Mandate with ASCM
Criminal Justice Without Cash: The Effect of Zero-Bail Policy on Property Crime

Human Development | Community Development | Economic Development

My Message

Lifting the Marginal

I study what happens when systems fail people, and what evidence-based policy can do to rebuild them. My work is grounded in measurement, not opinion. In causal proof, not ideology.

My work is animated by a single conviction: a society is only as strong as its most vulnerable members. This is not merely a moral statement. It is a testable, measurable, economic fact.

I am passionate about facilitating policies that advance public prosperity through education, healthcare, public safety, and food security. These are not separate agendas. They are one project: ensuring that every human being can participate fully in the economy and the community they belong to and become the best version of themselves.

Across the world, millions of people are displaced from productive participation, not by lack of talent but by systems that were never designed to include them. I call them the Marginal. The cost of their exclusion, measured in lives, labor, and lost potential, is one of the great unacknowledged crises of our time.

~1.3 Billion

The Sick & Recovering

Illness doesn't just cost lives. It removes people from the workforce, from their communities, from the systems that need them most. The World Economic Forum estimates the cumulative economic burden of preventable and undertreated conditions at $47 trillion over twenty years. The sick are not unproductive. They are unsupported.

WHO, Noncommunicable Diseases Fact Sheet (2023); World Economic Forum / Harvard School of Public Health (2011)

773 Million

The Uneducated & Undereducated

Adults worldwide lack basic literacy, and billions more are undereducated relative to the demands of a modern economy. This is not a talent deficit. It is a policy failure, and a solvable one.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2022). Global Education Monitoring Report.

~400 Million

The Unemployed & Underemployed

People globally who are without work or working far below their potential. When people cannot work, they do not stop existing. They stop contributing. Every barrier removed from employment is an investment with a measurable return.

ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2024. (Combines headline unemployment of ~186 million with ILO estimates of underemployment.)

1.6 Billion

The Unhoused & Housing-Insecure

People who lack adequate housing worldwide. You cannot plan, save, learn, or thrive without stable shelter. Housing is not a luxury. It is the platform on which every other form of human development rests.

UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2022. United Nations Human Settlements Programme.

What if we designed systems that brought the Marginal back into productive participation? Better schools, accessible healthcare, housing with dignity, criminal justice without cruelty, food security as a floor rather than an aspiration. The economic return would be measured in trillions. The human return — immeasurable. I use evidence to build that case. And I carry it into the rooms where decisions are made.

Topics I Speak On

Speaking & Keynotes

Victor speaks on Human Development, Community Development, and Economic Development, with a particular passion for education, skills training, vocational development, and workforce economics. All of his talks are grounded in evidence and real-world data. Other topics include:

The Economics of Exclusion

What the data show about the Marginal and the cost of systematic exclusion

Causal Inference and the Art of Knowing What Works

How evidence-based science should guide policy

Criminal Justice Reform

Evidence, not ideology: what the data say about incarceration and community safety

Healthcare Access as Economic Policy

Coverage, care, and what Medicaid expansion taught us

Education, Skills, and Economic Mobility

Why investment in workforce development, vocational education, and skills training is the highest-return policy a society can make

Food Security and Economic Productivity

Development economics and the crisis of hunger

The African Growth Story

Development, institutions, and the continent's untapped potential

From Diagnosis to Conviction

A scientist's journey through stage-four cancer, faith, and the data

Invite Victor to Speak

Available for keynotes, policy briefings, academic conferences, and media.

My Story

The Chapter No Journal Would Publish

"No cure. No hope. The prognosis was death — whatever years remained would be spent entirely on chemotherapy."

That was the diagnosis. Stage-four terminal cancer, spread to his back and leg. His left leg had folded and would not straighten. Victor could not walk, eat, or function normally. The doctors gave him four to six years — years he would spend on chemotherapy, not living.

During radiation and chemotherapy, he began studying the Bible on healing — and came to understand something that changed everything. He claimed those promises. He repeated them. Slowly, his health began to improve. His leg straightened. The pain subsided.

Today there is no cancer. There is no chemotherapy. There is only the work — and the deep conviction that every day since is a gift that demands to be spent on something that matters.

Read My Full Story

"He does not study poverty from a distance. He builds the evidence that dismantles it — because he knows what it means to fight for your life."