The fast growing statistical literatures on matching methods in several disciplines offer the promise of causal inference without resort to the difficult-to-justify functional form assumptions inherent in commonly used parametric methods. However, these literatures also suffer from many diverse...

Although central to understanding the role of the media, few quantitative measures of the political positions of media exist. Collecting and classifying editorials adopted by 23 major U.S. newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994-2004, we apply an item response theoretic approach to place...

How does partisan regulation of political markets affect elections? We investigate how the partisan control of ballot format, which is expressly regulated - often to the apparent advantage of incumbents and major parties - in all U.S. states, affects voting. Through the analysis of a unique...

The failure to appear (FTA) for a scheduled court hearing can have serious consequences for a criminal defendant. Many have speculated that transportation is a material barrier to court appearance. We provide evidence from the first randomized controlled trial of transportation subsidies to...

Since the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, social scientists have rediscovered a long tradition of research that investigates the effects of ballot format on voting. Using a new dataset collected by the New York Times, we investigate the causal effect of being listed on the first ballot page in...

Environmental law relies on self-monitoring by regulated parties, but reporting violations persist in nontrivial numbers. Failure to report on time can mask pollution problems and impede efficient enforcement efforts. We examine correlates of late reporting and present results of a collaborative...

Measuring average differences in an outcome across racial or ethnic groups is a crucial first step for equity assessments, but researchers often lack access to data on individuals' races and ethnicities to calculate them. A common solution is to impute the missing race or ethnicity labels using...