Using micro-level data on attorney incomes, we reconstruct the industrial organization of the Japanese legal services industry. These data suggest a bifurcated bar, with two sources of unusually high income: an idiosyncratic return to talent in Tokyo, and a compensating differential for the lack...

Most studies of executive compensation have data on pay but not total income. Because exchange-listed Japanese firms (unlike exchange-listed U.S. firms) need not disclose executive compensation figures in their securities filings, most studies on Japan lack even good data on pay. Through 2004,...

Many observers suggest that American citizens sue more readily than citizens elsewhere, and that American judges shape society more powerfully than judges elsewhere. We examine the problems involved in exploring these questions quantitatively. The data themselves indicate that American law’s...

This paper focuses on econometrics pedagogy. It demonstrates the importance of including probability weights in regression analysis using data from surveys that do not use simple random samples (SRS). We use concrete, numerical examples and simulation to show how to effectively teach this...

This paper analyzes how the budget allocated to state prosecutors' offices vary across prosecutorial districts and the reasons for such variation by empirical methods, using data from Census of Prosecutors and other sources. The main results of this paper are as follows. Other factors being...

While students typically want to earn high grades in college, they also, and perhaps even more so, want to earn high salaries after graduating college. In this paper, we explore whether there is a relationship between average grades earned in classes and the future salaries earned by graduates...

Colleges want to increase retention and graduation rates, but they are also under pressure to control costs. Increasing class size is a common method to reduce per student costs. This paper examines the relationship between class size and student achievement. Using data from a selective liberal...

This paper focuses on econometrics pedagogy. It demonstrates the importance of including probability weights in regression analysis using data from surveys that do not use simple random samples (SRS). We use concrete, numerical examples and simulation to show how to effectively teach this...

This econometrics pedagogy paper demonstrates the importance of using cluster standard errors with data generated from complex surveys. Simulation is used to show that both classic ordinary least squares and robust standard errors perform poorly in the presence of within-cluster correlated...