Understanding the nature of individual variation in speech, particularly the mechanism underlying such variability, is increasingly important, especially for research on sound change, since such investigations might help explain why sound change happens at all and, conversely, why sound change...

What modes of moral reasoning do judges employ? We construct a linear SVM classifier for moral reasoning mode trained on applied ethics articles written by consequentialists and deontologists. The model can classify a paragraph of text in held out data with over 90 percent accuracy. We then...

Scholars since Hume and Smith have debated possible causal connections between market experiences and moral beliefs. Here, I study the impact of market interactions on utilitarian versus deontological values, other-regarding preferences, and charitable donations. Through a labor market...

We collect data on the record of every action in hundreds of derivative cases and merger class actions involving public companies filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery from 2004 to 2011. We use these data to analyze how markets respond to litigation in the most important court for corporate...

We document motivated reasoning among U.S. Circuit Court judges. We employ a supervised learning approach to measure partisan influences on prose (writing style), precedent (citations to previous cases), and policy (dissenting votes). We find persistent but low partisanship of language overall,...

Experts and workers in many domains make multiple similar but independent decisions in sequence. Previous research has shown that the serial position of the case in the sequence, an irrelevant factor, often influences the decision. Yet, the conditions under which serial position effects emerge...

To build inputs for end-to-end machine learning estimates of the causal impacts of law, we consider the problem of automatically classifying cases by their policy impact. We propose and implement a semi-supervised multi-class learning model, with the training set being a hand-coded dataset of...

"Likert scales" are the most standard and widespread instrument in survey research when measuring public opinion on political and economic issues. In this simple approach, respondents are given the opportunity to voice their agreement or disagreement on a set of issues by placing their attitudes...