Gender inequality and discrimination still persist, even though the gender gap in the labor market has been gradually decreasing. This study examines the effect of the #MeToo movement on judges’ gender gap in their vital labor market outcome - judicial decisions on randomly assigned legal...

The United States federal mandatory minimums have been controversial not only because of the length of the mandatory sentences for even first-time offenders, but also because the eligibility quantities for crack are very small when compared to those for other drugs. This paper shows that the...

Does early release decrease or increase the probability that ex-convicts will return to prison? We exploit unique data from Israeli courts, where appearance before the judge throughout the day has an arbitrary component. We first show that judges more often deny parole requests of prisoners...

We provide the first analysis of racial in-group bias in Type-I and Type-II errors. Using player-referee matched data from NBA games we show that there is no overall racial bias or in-group bias in foul calls made by referees. Similarly, there is no racial bias or in-group bias in Type-I errors...

Although there exists a large literature analyzing whether an individual's peers have an impact on that individual's own behavior and subsequent outcomes, there is paucity of research on whether peers influence a person's decisions and judgments regarding a third party. We investigate whether...

Does labor court uncertainty and judge subjectivity influence firms performance? We study the economic consequences of judge decisions by collecting information on more than 145,000 Appeal court rulings, combined with administrative firm-level records covering the whole universe of French firms....

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...

This paper studies the causal impact of court deferrals, a legal strategy to help defendants avoid a felony conviction record, on the future criminal and labor market outcomes of first-time felony drug offenders. To accomplish this, we exploit two natural experiments in Harris County, Texas, in...

Climate change has stimulated growing interest in the influence of temperature on cognition, mood and decision making. This paper is the first investigation of the impact of temperature on the outcomes of criminal court cases. It is motivated by Heyes and Saberian (2019, AEJ: Applied Economics),...

The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA) affected the U.S. federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws for to crack cocaine offenders, and represented the first Congressional reform of sentencing laws in over 20 years. A primary goal of this legislation was to lessen the harshness of sentences for...