Empirical work has grown in importance in law and economics. This growth coincides with improvements in research designs in empirical microeconomics more generally. In this essay, we provide a stylized discussion of some trends over the last two or three decades, linking the credibility...

Litigation involves human beings, who are likely to be motivated to pursue their interests as they understand them. Empirical civil procedure researchers must take this fact seriously if we are to adequately characterize the effects of policy changes. To make this point concrete, I first step...

Event studies have become increasingly important in securities fraud litigation, and the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., heightened their importance by holding that the results of event studies could be used to obtain or rebut the presumption of...

In recent years, much attention has been directed at the ongoing increase in body weight, and what might be done about it. We use data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the period 1982-1996 to estimate models relating measures of body weight (BMI, a dummy indicating that a...

Microeconometrics researchers have increasingly realized the essential need to account for any within-group dependence in estimating standard errors of regression parameter estimates. The typical preferred solution is to calculate cluster-robust or sandwich standard errors that permit quite...

I show that among women likely to use welfare, movers move to higher-benefit states. I also find that the probability likely welfare users will move at all is lower in higher-benefit states. This effect is concentrated early in the life cycle, as theory predicts. I construct a theoretical...

In this paper we propose a new variance estimator for OLS as well as for nonlinear estimators such as logit, probit and GMM, that provcides cluster-robust inference when there is two-way or multi-way clustering that is non-nested. The variance estimator extends the standard cluster-robust...

Proposals aimed at improving the welfare of the poor often include indicator targeting, in which non-income characteristics (such as race, gender, or land ownership) that are correlated with income are used to target limited funds to groups likely to include a cincentration of the poor. Previous...