After forty years of school consolidation, the preponderance of the evidence, including the results presented in this paper, suggest that the race to reap returns to scale and specialization in education may have come at a high price. This paper uses newly available STAR test score data from...

Most studies of the deterrence effect of incarceration treat a year in prison as having the same deterrence effect regardless of the conditions of incarceration. In contrast, we estimate both the impact of custody rate and prison location changes on female crime rates. We take advantage of the...

It has long since been established that children raised by single parents are more likely to become sexually active, commit illegal acts, and use illegal drugs at young ages. What has not been determined is whether or not there is a causal effect associated with the disintegration of the family....

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the US jury system needs to be 'fixed.' Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show...

The Coase theorem presents two criteria for evaluating regulation. The first is how successful the regulation is at reaching the efficient outcome relative to private solutions. The second and less discussed criterion is how the regulation affects the distribution of wealth. Previous studies of...

Politicians are not neutral maximizers of the public good, they respond to incentives just like other individuals. We apply the same reasoning to those politicians in robes called judges. We argue that elected judges, particularly partisan elected judges, have an incentive to redistribute wealth...

We show that under arguably plausible assumptions regarding the DNA exoneration process, in expectation, the ratio of DNA exoneration rates across races among defendants convicted for the same crime in the same state provides an upper bound on the ratio of wrongful conviction rates across races...

We examine the extent to which DNA exonerations can reveal whether wrongful conviction rates differ across races. We show that under a wide-range of assumptions regarding possible explicit or implicit racial biases in the DNA exoneration process (including no bias), our results suggest the...

We study corporate philanthropy using an original database that includes firm-level data on dollar giving, giving priorities, governance, and managerial involvement in giving programs. Results provide some support for the theory that giving enhances shareholder value, as firms in the same...

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. We find that the average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black countypoverty rate...