We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...

Many jurisdictions levy sizable fines and fees (legal financial obligations, or LFOs) on criminal defendants. Proponents argue LFOs are a "tax on crime" that funds courts and provides deterrence; opponents argue they do neither. We examine the fiscal implications of lowering LFOs. Incentives to...

We examine the relationship between product liability litigation and innovation by systematically combining data on product liability lawsuits with data on new product introductions in a panel dataset of leading medical device firms. We first document a decline in the propensity to introduce new...

When judges have discretion over fines and prison terms, sentencing exhibits a tendency" toward efficiency: fines are larger, and prison terms shorter, for offenders with greater ability to" pay. Sentencing guidelines place fairly rigid upper and lower limits on fines and prison terms" and may...

New data on medical malpractice claims against a single hospital where a direct measure of the quality of medical care is available are used to address 1) the specific question of the role of the negligence rule in the dispute settlement process in medical malpractice, and 2) the general...

In nuisance-type cases, legal commentators generally recommend -- and the courts seem to increasingly use -- the award of damages rather than the granting of an injunction of the harmed party. This essay compares the economic consequences of injunctive and damage remedies under a variety of...

This paper provides causal evidence of the effect of private prisons on criminal sentencing. Our identification strategy uses state-level changes in private-prison capacity and compares changes in sentencing across trial court pairs that straddle state borders. We find that a doubling of private...

Existing empirical evidence suggests a pervasive pattern of electoral cycles in criminal sentencing in the U.S.: judges appear to pass more punitive sentences when they are up for re-election, consistent with models of signaling where voters have more punitive preferences than judges. However,...

This paper examines the extent to which criminal conviction rates are affected by the similarity in gender of the defendant and jury. To identify effects, we exploit random variation in both the assignment to jury pools and the ordering of potential jurors. We do so using detailed administrative...

We shot videos of criminal trials using 3D Virtual Reality (VR) technology, prosecuted by actual prosecutors and defended by actual defense attorneys in an actual courtroom. This is the first paper that utilizes VR technology in a non-computer animated setting, which allows us to replace white...