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Rankings without U.S. News: A revealed preference approach to evaluating law schools Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2024-04-12 Jesse Rothstein, Albert Yoon
Since their inception in 1989, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have influenced how schools, students, and the legal profession itself think about legal education. In the Fall of 2022, however, several of the most selective law schools formally withdrew from the annual rankings. In so doing, these schools laid bare longstanding criticisms of the rankings' questionable criteria and opaque
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Litigation with negative expected value suits: An experimental analysis Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Cary Deck, Paul Pecorino, Michael Solomon
The existence of lawsuits providing plaintiffs a negative expected value (NEV) at trial has important theoretical implications for signaling models of litigation. The signaling equilibrium possible when there are no NEV suits breaks down because plaintiffs with NEV suits do not have a credible threat to proceed to trial, which undermines the ability to signal type. Using a laboratory experiment, we
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The role of character-based personal mitigation in sentencing judgments Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2024-01-13 Ian K. Belton, Mandeep K. Dhami
Personal mitigating factors (PMFs) such as good character, remorse and addressing addiction help sentencers evaluate an offender's past, present and future behavior. We analyzed data from the 2011–2014 Crown Court Sentencing Surveys in England and Wales to examine the relationship between these PMFs and custodial sentences passed on assault and burglary offenses, controlling for other sentencing relevant
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“They don't let us speak”: Gender, collegiality, and interruptions in deliberations in the Brazilian Supreme Court Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2024-01-13 Diego Werneck Arguelhes, Juliana Cesario Alvim, Rafaela Nogueira, Henrique Wang
In this paper, we examine a database containing court rulings and debates (acórdãos) of the Brazilian Supreme Court (“STF”) spanning from 1999 to 2018. Our objective is to analyze the relationship between gender and how judges behave when interacting with each other. Specifically, we investigate whether female judges are more likely to be interrupted by their colleagues during oral debates. Our data
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Bargaining power in the market for intellectual property: Evidence from licensing contract terms Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Gaurav Kankanhalli, Alan Kwan
We study a novel database of intellectual property (IP) licensing agreements sourced from filings made by publicly listed corporations, a large fraction of which firms (initially) disclose with redacted terms. In contrast to the benchmark that IP quality alone determines the pricing of IP, we argue that bargaining power between licensing counterparties plays a critical role in explaining several patterns
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Consent searches and underestimation of compliance: Robustness to type of search, consequences of search, and demographic sample Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Roseanna Sommers, Vanessa K. Bohns
Most police searches today are authorized by citizens' consent, rather than probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The main constitutional limitation on so-called “consent searches” is the voluntariness test: whether a reasonable person would have felt free to refuse the officer's request to conduct the search. We investigate whether this legal inquiry is subject to a systematic bias whereby uninvolved
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Consent searches: Evaluating the usefulness of a common and highly discretionary police practice Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Megan Dias, Derek A. Epp, Marcel Roman, Hannah L. Walker
We analyze the consequences of using driver consent as a basis for initializing a traffic stop-and-search compared to those searches based on probable cause. We find that consent searches are less likely to result in contraband recovery than are probable cause searches. Moreover, police agencies with a relatively higher reliance on consent searches find similar amounts of contraband and make a similar
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Constitutional accountability for police shootings Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Greg Goelzhauser
Constitutional accountability for police shootings is imposed in part through civil rights lawsuits alleging Fourth Amendment violations, but little is known about how judges evaluate these claims. I introduce original data on all federal circuit court decisions resolving Fourth Amendment excessive force claims in police shooting cases over three decades. The quasi-random assignment of a majority-Republican
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Strategic subdelegation Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Brian D. Feinstein, Jennifer Nou
Appointed leaders of administrative agencies routinely record subdelegations of governmental authority to civil servants. That appointees willingly cede authority in this way presents a puzzle, at least at first glance: Why do these appointees assign their power to civil servants insulated by merit protection laws, that is, to employees over whom they have limited control? This article develops and
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Secured credit and bankruptcy resolution Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Barry E. Adler, Vedran Capkun
Accepted wisdom holds that secured creditors favor liquidation of a debtor in bankruptcy even where the debtor may be more valuable as a going concern. This is false wisdom, however. Holders of senior claims can be expected to favor liquidation prior to a debtor's bankruptcy because the return on such claims are capped by the amount owed while debtor asset values fluctuate. But bankruptcy is a day
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Measuring law's normative force Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Kevin L. Cope
An important question in legal theory and policy is when people are willing to put aside their policy preferences to uphold higher-order legal values. That is, when does constitutional or international law, for instance, have “normative force”? Around two-dozen experimental studies have attempted to measure this question empirically, but their designs contain an inherent limitation. While they are
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Gender gaps in legal education: The impact of class participation assessments Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Kenneth Khoo, Jaclyn Neo
The gender gap is a well-studied phenomenon in education policy. Although prior research has illustrated the presence of this gap in US Law Schools, questions remain as to whether these findings are generalizable to other jurisdictions where national, cultural, historical, institutional, and societal norms are substantially different. In this article, we investigate the presence and nature of a gender
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Paid medical malpractice claims: How strongly does the past predict the future? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Kowsar Yousefi, Bernard Black, David A. Hyman
When does the past predict the future? In financial markets, warnings that “past results are no guarantee of future performance” are ubiquitous. But in multiple fields (including professional sports, insurance, and criminal law), it is widely believed that the past is a useful guide to the future. Does that insight apply to medical malpractice (“med mal”)? Using a novel dataset (which includes detailed
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The role of cable news hosts in public support for Supreme Court decisions Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-10-15 Scott Simon Boddery, Damon Cann, Laura Moyer, Jeff Yates
In the current media environment, Americans increasingly tune into cable news programs with distinct ideological brands. This paper extends existing work on media source cues to coverage of the US Supreme Court, an institution which depends entirely on media outlets to communicate its rulings to the American public. We argue that the source cues associated with celebrity media personalities serve as
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The effects of price transparency and debt collection policies on intentions to consume recommended health care: A randomized vignette experiment Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Christopher T. Robertson, Wendy Netter Epstein, Hansoo Ko
New laws promote price transparency in health care, though effects on patient decision-making are not known. Price disclosure may increase the salience of cost and cause lower-income patients to decline recommended care, worsening inequities in health outcomes. Whether patients perceive a disclosed cost as higher or lower than their expectations may also affect care decisions, but has not been studied
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The market for general counsel Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Dhruv Chand Aggarwal
This paper presents the first systematic descriptive study of the market for general counsel (GCs) in publicly traded US companies. Using a hand-collected dataset, I track the backgrounds and careers of 3409 GCs, and establish basic facts about the hiring, firing, demographics, and politics of inhouse counsel. Most GCs are outsiders to their companies, not having previously worked in subordinate positions
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Biases in legal decision-making: Comparing prosecutors, defense attorneys, law students, and laypersons Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Doron Teichman, Eyal Zamir, Ilana Ritov
Previous studies of judgment and decision-making in adjudication have largely focused on juries and judges. This body of work demonstrated that legal training and professional experience sometimes affect attitudes and mitigate the susceptibility to cognitive biases, but often they do not. Relatively few experimental studies examined the decisions of prosecutors and defense lawyers, although they play
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Judging fast or slow: The effects of reduced caseloads on gender- and ethnic-based disparities in case outcomes Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Tamar Kricheli-Katz, Keren Weinshall
What is the effect of caseload volume on case outcome disparities based on a litigant's gender or ethnicity? This paper presents three nonexclusive mechanisms to explain possible effects. The first mechanism relates to a litigant's inclination to settle or withdraw claims; the second mechanism concerns the strategic preemption of appeals by judges; and the third mechanism relates to the implicit biases
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Quantifying disparate questioning of Black and White jurors in capital jury selection Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Anna Effenberger, John H. Blume, Martin T. Wells
Numerous studies have demonstrated that female and Black jurors are under-represented on juries in criminal cases, especially so when the prosecution seeks the death penalty. The primary, but not exclusive, way in which this happens is that prosecutors remove them from the jury pool through the exercise of peremptory challenges. The practice remains widespread despite the Supreme Court's decision more
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Effect of financial incentives on hospital-cardiologist integration and cardiac test location Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Andy Ye Yuan, Bernard Black, Timea Viragh, David J. Magid, Qian Luo, Ali Moghtaderi
Starting around 2006, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) progressively reduced Medicare Fee-for-Service (M-FFS) payments for the principal noninvasive cardiac tests, when performed in a cardiologist office (Office), yet kept payments flat to increasing for the same tests, performed in the hospital-based outpatient (HBO) setting. This produced a growing gap between HBO and Office payments
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The usage and utility of body-worn camera footage in courts: A survey analysis of state prosecutors Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Kevin Petersen, Donald Papy, Alejandro Mouro, Barak Ariel
Despite substantial recent developments in body-worn camera (BWC) research, little is known about the effect of BWC footage on downstream criminal justice actors and agencies. Analyzing both quantitative and qualitative survey responses taken from state prosecutors in Miami-Dade County (FL) in 2019, this study provides one of the most detailed examinations of prosecutors' experiences with BWC footage
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Plugging the pipe? Evaluating the (null) effects of leaks on Supreme Court legitimacy Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Nathan T. Carrington, Logan Strother
Occasionally, information about the inner workings of the Supreme Court is leaked to the press by insiders—clerks, or even justices themselves. These leaks reliably stoke controversy among commentators and academics alike who pontificate on the negative effect leaks have on the Court's institutional legitimacy. However, it is not immediately clear from existing theories whether populating the media
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The effect of judges' gender on decisions regarding intimate-partner violence Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Joan Josep Vallbé, Carmen Ramírez-Folch
This article aims at disentangling the effect of judges' gender, experience, and caseload in the assignment of restraining orders in IPV cases. Previous literature has independently looked at the effect of gender on judicial decisions and found that it becomes relevant in gender-related cases. However, we find that such effects are better understood in interaction with other contextual factors such
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Settlement schemas: How laypeople understand civil settlement Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Jessica Bregant, Verity Winship
What does the public think it means to “settle” a civil case? Most legal disputes in the United States end in an agreement to settle, but little is known about what laypeople think about settlement. To fill this gap, we took a direct approach: we asked a nationally representative sample of US adults—more than 1000 of them—basic questions about settlement. We found widespread understanding about the
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Racial diversity and group decision-making in a mock jury experiment Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-05-11
Hakstian, A.-M., Evett, S. R., Hoffmann, J. S., Marshall, J. M., Boyland, E. A. L., & Williams, J. D. (2022). Racial diversity and group decision-making in a mock jury experiment. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 19(4), 1253–1292. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12335 In Hakstian et al. (2022), there were errors in Figures 2 and 3, published on Page 1271, the y-axis and the corresponding values on
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Sudden lockdown repeals, social mobility, and COVID-19: Evidence from a judicial natural experiment Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Dhaval Dave, Andrew I. Friedson, Kyutaro Matsuzawa, Drew McNichols, Joseph J. Sabia
The imposition and lifting of COVID-19 lockdown orders were among the most heatedly debated policies during the pandemic. Credible empirical evaluations of the effects of reopening policies are difficult because policymakers often explicitly linked sustained reductions in COVID-19 cases to the lifting of lockdown orders. This hardwired policy endogeneity creates challenges in isolating the causal effects
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How accurate are rebuttable presumptions of pretrial dangerousness? A natural experiment from New Mexico Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-04-23 Cristopher Moore, Elise Ferguson, Paul Guerin
In New Mexico and many other jurisdictions, judges may detain defendants pretrial if the prosecutor proves, through clear and convincing evidence, that releasing them would pose a danger to the public. However, some policymakers argue that certain classes of defendants should have a “rebuttable presumption” of dangerousness, shifting the burden of proof to the defense. Using data on over 15,000 felony
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Gender, race, and job satisfaction of law graduates: Intersectional evidence from the National Survey of College Graduates Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Joni Hersch
Studies typically find that lawyers have high job satisfaction and that women are not less satisfied than are men. But racial differences as well as gender differences by race or ethnicity in satisfaction may be masked because most lawyers identify as racially White. To examine whether job satisfaction differs by race and whether gender and race/ethnicity have an intersectional relation to job satisfaction
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An empirical analysis of sentencing of “Access to Information” computer crimes Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 James T. Graves, Alessandro Acquisti
There is a widespread perception that computer crime sentencing is too harsh. But this criticism has occurred in the absence of comprehensive, multi-year data on how computer crimes are actually sentenced and how those sentences compare to other, purportedly similar crimes, such as trespass, burglary, or fraud. This article uses an analysis of real-world sentencing data to examine how the computer
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Can you trust your lawyer's call? Legal advisers exhibit myside bias resistant to debiasing interventions Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Mihael A. Jeklic
In a vast majority of disputes, settlement is superior to litigation, which involves uncertainty, legal fees, and opportunity cost. Unnecessary litigation also causes judicial backlog, wastes resources, and increases societal conflict. Major contributors to the lack of settlement are intransigent litigants who harbor overoptimistic predictions of litigation outcomes, even though they are looking at
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Beyond republicans and the disapproval of regulations: A new empirical approach to the Congressional Review Act Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-03-26 Steven J. Balla, Bridget C. E. Dooling, Daniel R. Pérez
Under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), legislators deploy expedited procedures to repeal agency regulations. For decades, the conventional wisdom—drawn from a handful of cases in which rules were repealed—has been that the CRA is primarily used by Republicans to nullify regulations issued at the close of Democratic presidential administrations. In this article, we demonstrate that the conventional
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The distribution of in-person public K-12 education in the time of COVID: An empirical perspective Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-03-25 Michael Heise
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most schools across the United States abruptly transitioned to remote, virtual learning in the spring of 2020. For the 2020–2021 school year, however, public school districts' instructional mode decisions (in-person, hybrid, and remote) varied across districts and throughout the school year. This study focuses on factors that informed school districts' instructional
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A Faustian bargain? Rethinking the role of debt in law students' career choices Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-01-21 Steven A. Boutcher, Jason N. Houle, Anna Raup-Kounovksy, Carroll Seron
Despite the absence of strong empirical evidence to support the relationship, legal scholars have long argued that a model of financing legal education through student debt makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most students to take seriously a career path in government and public interest (GPI) law, where salaries are generally lower than private, corporate practice. Drawing from a multiwave
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Racial bias as a multi-stage, multi-actor problem: An analysis of pretrial detention Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Joshua Grossman, Julian Nyarko, Sharad Goel
After arrest, criminal defendants are often detained before trial to mitigate potential risks to public safety. There is widespread concern, however, that detention decisions are biased against racial minorities. When assessing potential racial discrimination in pretrial detention, past studies have typically worked to quantify the extent to which the ultimate judicial decision is conditioned on the
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Managerial litigation risk and corporate investment efficiency: Evidence from universal demand laws Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Leonard Leye Li, Gary S. Monroe, Jeff Coulton
We examine the effect of managerial litigation risk on corporate investment efficiency. Exploiting the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States and employing a stacked regression approach, we find that the exogenous reduction in litigation risk induced by UD laws leads to lower investment efficiency. Our results are robust to the use of alternative partitioning variables
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JD-Next: A valid and reliable tool to predict diverse students' success in law school Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Burross, Katherine C. Cheng, Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li, Christopher Robertson
Admissions tests have increasingly come under attack by those seeking to broaden access and reduce disparities in higher education. Meanwhile, in other sectors there is a movement towards “work-sample” or “proximal” testing. Especially for underrepresented students, the goal is to measure not just the accumulated knowledge and skills that they would bring to a new academic program, but also their ability
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One judge to rule them all: Single-member courts as an answer to delays in criminal trials Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Konstantinos Kalliris, Theodore Alysandratos
This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single-member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between
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Asymmetric review of qualified immunity appeals Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Alexander A. Reinert
This article presents results from the most comprehensive study to date of the resolution of qualified immunity in the federal courts of appeals and the US Supreme Court. By analyzing more than 4000 appellate decisions issued between 2004 and 2015, this study provides novel insights into how courts of appeals resolve arguments for qualified immunity. Moreover, by conducting an unprecedented analysis
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Can moral framing drive insurance enrollment in the United States? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Wendy Netter Epstein, Christopher T. Robertson, David Yokum, Hansoo Ko, Kevin H. Wilson, Monica Ramos, Katherine Kettering, Margaret Houtz
To encourage health insurance uptake, marketers and policymakers have focused on consumers' economic self-interest, attempting to show that insurance is a good deal or to sweeten the deal, with subsidies or penalties. Still, some consumers see insurance as a bad deal, either because they rationally exploit private risk information (“adverse selection”), or irrationally misperceive the value due to
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Examining the effects of antidiscrimination laws on children in the foster care and adoption systems Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Netta Barak-Corren, Yoav Kan-Tor, Nelson Tebbe
How are children affected when states prohibit child welfare agencies from discriminating against same-sex couples who wish to foster or adopt? This question stands at the heart of a debate between governments that seek to impose such antidiscrimination requirements and child welfare agencies that challenge them on religious freedom grounds. Yet until now there has been no reliable evidence on whether
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Stay at home if you can: COVID-19 stay-at-home guidelines and local crime Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Carlos Díaz, Sebastian Fossati, Nicolás Trajtenberg
Government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on mobility patterns with implications for public safety and crime dynamics in countries across the planet. This paper explores the effect of stay-at-home guidelines on thefts and robberies at the neighborhood level in a Latin American city. We exploit neighborhood heterogeneity in the ability of working adults to comply with
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Should patients use online reviews to pick their doctors and hospitals? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-11-03 David A. Hyman, Jing Liu, Bernard S. Black
We compare the online reviews of 221 “Questionable” Illinois and Indiana physicians with multiple paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions with matched control physicians with clean records. Across five prominent online rating services, we find small, mostly insignificant differences in star ratings and written reviews for Questionable versus control physicians. Only one rating service
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Racial diversity and group decision-making in a mock jury experiment Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Anne-Marie Hakstian, Sophia R. Evett, James S. Hoffmann, Jane M. Marshall, Emory A. L. Boyland, Jerome D. Williams
The primary goal of this research was to determine whether the racial composition of a jury impacts the outcome and deliberation in a civil retail discrimination lawsuit. We presented a retail discrimination trial video to 30 separate mock juries. Of the 30 juries, 15 juries had 2 Black jurors, while the remaining 15 had no Black jurors (i.e., only White or White and Latinx participants). After watching
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Lucky you: Your case is heard by a seasoned panel—Panel effects in the German Constitutional Court Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Christoph Engel
Panel effects have been widely studied in randomly composed panels. However, for many courts, panel composition stays constant. Then judges become familiar with each other. They know what to expect from each other. Mutual trust may develop. A local culture may emerge. If rejection is the default, familiarity is likely to help plaintiffs, as familiar panels can be more effective, and more self-confident
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Do data breach notification laws reduce medical identity theft? Evidence from consumer complaints data Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Aniket Kesari
As the number of data breaches in the United States grows each year, cybersecurity has become an increasingly important policy area. The primary mechanism for regulating and deterring data breaches is the “data breach notification law.” Every US state now has such a law that mandates that certain organizations disclose data breaches to their data subjects. Despite the popularity of these laws, there
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Does an initial public offering (IPO) issuer's Securities and Exchange Commission registration fee calculation method predict pricing revisions and IPO underpricing? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Patrick M. Corrigan
This paper proposes a new proxy for the ex ante expectations of issuers and their underwriters about the direction of pricing revisions during the roadshows of an initial public offering (IPO): the way issuers elect to calculate the registration fees owed to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Consistent with fee-minimizing decision-making, I find that the choice of fee calculation method is associated
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Property rights and market behavior in the low-income housing sector: Evidence from Chile Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Diego Gil, Pablo A. Celhay
Recent decades have seen a strong commitment in development theory and practice toward the idea of promoting homeownership among low-income families, partly based on the idea that property formalization constitutes an important vehicle for social mobility and economic development. However, the empirical evidence on this theory is not conclusive. This paper aims to explore this idea using evidence from
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The impact of paid sick leave laws on consumer and business bankruptcies Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-09-25 Michelle M. Miller
This paper examines how missed income due to illness impacts household fragility. Specifically, it shows that paid sick leave laws, which provide households insurance against illness-related income shocks, reduce consumer bankruptcy. Using a panel dataset at the county-quarter level, this paper exploits the geographic and temporal variation in the adoption of paid sick leave laws to implement a di
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Self-nudging contracts and the positive effects of autonomy—Analyzing the prospect of behavioral self-management Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-08-21 Stephan Tontrup, Christopher Jon Sprigman
Nudging interventions typically presume some asymmetry of sophistication and power between the choice architect and the nudged. But the nudged need not be relegated to a passive role. We present evidence that individuals have a capacity to counter their biases, and even to use them to their advantage. This capacity for behavioral self-management (“BSM”) can allow them to act as the choice architects
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Ideological bias in constitutional judgments: Experimental analysis and potential solutions Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, Jarosław Kantorowicz, Keren Weinshall
Despite the importance and neutrality of constitutional rights, empirical research suggests that ideological inclinations unduly affect their assessment and application. In this study, we conducted two experiments in order to investigate the nature of the ideological bias in a constitutionally relevant decision (right-to-demonstration), and how to mitigate it. We find that ideological bias is driven
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Who donates and how? New evidence on the tax incentives in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-07-24 Giedre Lideikyte Huber, Marta Pittavino
The present study is the first large-scale empirical legal analysis of tax incentives for charitable giving in Switzerland, and one of the few studies globally. Using unique longitudinal data including household income and wealth of the entire taxpayers' population of the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, we study patterns of charitable deductions and characteristics of donors making such deductions.
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Charging sex traffickers under federal law: What dispositions should we expect when applying theories on prosecutorial decision-making? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-07-22 Shana M. Judge, Jenna L. Dole
Previous research on prosecutorial decision-making has detailed prosecutors' considerable discretionary power along with their desire to avoid uncertain outcomes. However, few studies have applied this decision-making framework to criminal case outcomes. We addressed this gap by analyzing prosecutors' charging decisions and charge dispositions through the lens of a unique crime: sex trafficking. In
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Does greater police funding help catch more murderers? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-07-20 David Bjerk
This paper examines the impact of police funding on the fraction of homicides that are cleared by arrest. Using data covering homicides in approximately 50 of the largest US cities from 2007 to 2017, I find no evidence that greater police funding resulted in higher homicide clearance rates. This finding is robust to linear regression and instrumental variable approaches, different ways to measure police
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Do doctors prescribe antibiotics out of fear of malpractice? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-05-30 Sebastian Panthöfer
This paper studies whether doctors prescribe antibiotics to protect themselves against potential malpractice claims. Using data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey on a representative sample of doctor visits from 1993 to 2011, I find that doctors are significantly less likely to prescribe antibiotics following tort reforms that reduce malpractice pressure. The changing prescribing patterns
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Does judicial foreclosure procedure help delinquent subprime mortgage borrowers? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-04-30 Aidong Adam Ding, Shaonan Tian, Yan Yu, Xinlei Zhao
We conduct comprehensive analyses on whether and how the judicial foreclosure procedure helps subprime mortgage borrowers to reinstate their delinquent loans outside foreclosure liquidation. Even though the transition rates of various exit types are all higher in non-judicial states, we argue such higher rates can be mechanically driven by the faster shrinking pool of delinquent mortgages in non-judicial
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Framing negligence Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Shoham Choshen-Hillel, Ehud Guttel, Alon Harel
This article uncovers the role of framing in the determination of negligence. Negligence disputes fall into two categories: cases in which injurers inflicted harm while seeking to avoid a loss to themselves (loss frame) and those in which they were seeking to obtain a personal gain (gain frame). We develop a theoretical framework whereby the frame of the injurer's behavior shapes negligence determinations
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Intensified support for juvenile offenders on probation: Evidence from Germany Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-04-19 Christoph Engel, Sebastian J. Goerg, Christian Traxler
This paper studies a probation program in Cologne, Germany. The program, which has a clear rehabilitative focus, offers intensified personal support to serious juvenile offenders over the first 6 months of their probation period. To evaluate the program's impact on recidivism, we draw on two research designs. Firstly, a small-scale randomized trial assigns offenders to probation with regular or intensified
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Introducing twin corpora of decisions for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-04-13 Seán Fobbe
In this article I present the first two of a new series of open and high-quality international legal data sets: comprehensive, fully reproducible, human- and machine-readable open access collections covering one hundred years of case law of the primary judicial organs of the United Nations and the League of Nations: the Corpus of Decisions: International Court of Justice (CD-ICJ) and the Corpus of
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Appellate court assignments as a natural experiment: Gender panel effects in sex discrimination cases Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-04-13 Robert S. Erikson
This paper argues that estimating causal effects on US Appellate Court panels can be advanced by analyzing the data as a series of natural experiments, fully exploiting the as-if random assignment of judges to cases. As a template, this paper reanalyzes Boyd et al.'s data on sex-discrimination cases. The question is the impact on the votes by male judges from having a female judge on their panel. Leverage
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U.S. Copyright Termination Notices 1977–2020: Introducing New Datasets Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (IF 2.346) Pub Date : 2022-02-27 Joshua Yuvaraj, Rebecca Giblin, Daniel Russo-Batterham, Genevieve Grant
Copyright termination laws in the United States allow creators to end their copyright assignments and licences after various time periods and regain their rights. These laws are designed to protect authors and their heirs by giving them a second opportunity to profit from their works, where they might have assigned them initially for relatively little. Similar laws are in force and being recommended