Appellate judges face a trade-off when deciding whether to remand cases: delegating the decision power enables to transfer effort costs to the lower court, but may be costly in terms of ideological preferences and reputation costs. Our empirical analysis of federal cases reveals that this trade-off creates a ‘Subsequent Remand Effect’: cases remanded by the Supreme Court to appellate courts are far more likely to be subsequently remanded to district courts, compared to other cases. This effect varies with judicial ideologies, suggesting that the tendency to (subsequently) remand might be driven by moral hazard problems rather than case-relevant attributes.

上诉法官在决定是否发回重审时面临权衡：下放决定权可以将努力成本转移到下级法院，但在意识形态偏好和声誉成本方面可能代价高昂。我们对联邦案件的实证分析表明，这种权衡会产生“后续发回重审效应”：与其他案件相比，被最高法院发回上诉法院的案件随后被发回地区法院的可能性要大得多。这种影响因司法意识形态而异，这表明（随后）还押的趋势可能是由道德风险问题而不是与案件相关的属性驱动的。