Politicians' behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges.Using data from 1925-2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life, I find that just...

The emphasis on “fit” as a hiring criterion has raised the spectrum of a new form of subtle discrimination (Yoshino 1998; Bertrand and Duflo 2016). Under complete markets, correlations between employee characteristics and outcomes persist only if there exists animus for the marginal employer...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the effects of the early law-and- economics movement on the U.S. judiciary. We focus on the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges, an intensive economics course that trained almost half of federal judges between 1976 and 1999. Using the...

We find field evidence consistent with experimental studies that document the contexts and characteristics making individuals more susceptible to priming. Just before U.S. Presidential elections, judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals double the rate at which they dissent and vote along partisan...

Stereotypes are thought to be an important determinant of decision making, but they are hard to systematically measure, especially for individuals in policy-making roles. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel language-based measure of gender stereotypes for the high-stakes context of...

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,...

The change in elected officials’ behavior when an election nears has typically been attributed to incentive effects. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges. Using data from 1925-2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life, I find that just before...