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on Law and Economics |
| By: | Jeffrey T. Denning; Benjamin Hansen; Lars Lefgren; Emily C. Leslie; Cody Tuttle |
| Abstract: | We examine disparities in judicial outcomes among people charged with Driving While Intoxicated (DWI), a setting in which legal guilt is objectively determined by breath alcohol content (BrAC). Focusing on first-time offenders with no aggravating circumstances and BrAC above the legal threshold, we find that race, gender, and financial resources strongly predict the likelihood of incarceration and case dismissal. Defendants with greater socioeconomic advantage are more likely to access rehabilitative alternatives and avoid criminal records. We discuss how these outcome differences may reflect not only disparities in options offered by the court, but also in defendants’ choices among them. |
| JEL: | D63 J15 J78 K14 K42 |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34425 |
| By: | Daniel Borbely (Department of Economics, Queen’s University Belfast,); Markus Gehrsitz (Department of Economics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow); Stuart McIntyre (Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn); Gennaro Rossi (Department of Economics, University of Reading) |
| Abstract: | School closures occur regularly, driven by declining school performance, depopulation, school buildings not meeting safety regulations, and a range of other factors. This has given rise to a large literature examining the effect of school closures on educational outcomes, but only a limited literature on the effect of these closures on local crime rates. In this paper we study the effects of permanent school closures on crime. We leverage the closure of over 200 schools in Scotland between the school years 2006/07 and 2018/19, and employ a staggered difference-in-differences design. Our results show that neighbourhoods affected by school closures experience a reduction in crime of about 10% of a standard deviation, relative to areas where schools remained open. This effect is mainly driven by a reduction in vandalism and property crimes. We provide evidence on several mechanisms explaining the negative crime effect, such as changes in neighbourhood composition and displacement of crime-prone youth. |
| Keywords: | crime, school closures, neighbourhoods |
| JEL: | I38 R20 K42 |
| Date: | 2025–11–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2025-06 |
| By: | Stephen B. Billings; Michael D. Makowsky; Kevin Schnepel; Adam Soliman |
| Abstract: | From 2005 to 2019, forty US states raised the dollar value threshold delineating misdemeanor and felony theft, reducing the expected punishment for a subset of property crimes. Using an event study framework, we observe significant and growing increases in theft after a state reform is passed. We then show that reduced sanctions for theft have broader effects in the market for illegal activity. Consistent with a mechanism of substitution across income-generating crimes, we find decreases in both drug distribution crimes and the probability that a released offender previously convicted of drug distribution is reincarcerated for a new drug conviction. |
| Keywords: | crime, theft, felony, punishment |
| Date: | 2025–10–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2130 |
| By: | Taneesha Datta |
| Abstract: | The economic impact of electing members of minority groups into positions of political power is well-established. However, the impact of political representation on broader civil rights and liberties, and particularly access to justice, remains unexplored. This paper employs a close-election regression discontinuity design to explore whether female political representation can explain judicial outcomes in the Indian context, focusing on crimes against women. Despite politicians having no formal influence over the judiciary, I find that the election of a female politician generates a large and statistically significant increase in the likelihood of conviction for crimes against women, relative to the election of a male politician. I do not find similar differences in the likelihood of conviction for gender-neutral crimes, suggesting that female politicians shape judicial outcomes within issue areas that align with gendered spheres of influence and interest. Additional analysis - on whether female politicians cater to gendered preferences in public goods and whether the effect of female representation on the likelihood of conviction varies with local gender bias - points to two potentially important mechanisms. These include a policy channel, whereby female politicians actively attempt to act in women’s interests, and an exposure channel, whereby observing female representatives positively informs citizens’ views on women’s competencies. This study emphasises the importance of political representation in expanding vulnerable groups’ access to justice. |
| Keywords: | Political economy, law, political representation, gender, close elections, India |
| JEL: | D72 J16 O43 D78 H73 K4 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2025-11 |
| By: | Jorge A. Arroyo |
| Abstract: | I evaluate San Juan, Puerto Rico's late-night alcohol sales ordinance using a multi-outcome synthetic control that pools economic and public-safety series. I show that a common-weight estimator clarifies mechanisms under low-rank outcome structure. I find economically meaningful reallocations in targeted sectors -- restaurants and bars, gasoline and convenience, and hospitality employment -- while late-night public disorder arrests and violent crime show no clear departures from pre-policy trends. The short post-policy window and small donor pool limit statistical power; joint conformal and permutation tests do not reject the null at conventional thresholds. I therefore emphasize effect magnitudes, temporal persistence, and pre-trend fit over formal significance. Code and diagnostics are available for replication. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.25782 |
| By: | Anne Epaulard; Chloé Zapha |
| Abstract: | We estimate the impact of a 2009 reform that merged small bankruptcy courts on the quality of their rulings. A conceptual framework enables us to link difference-in-difference estimates to the impact of the reform on Type 1 errors (restructuring a non-viable firm) and Type 2 errors (liquidating a viable firm). We apply this framework to an (almost) exhaustive sample of 600, 000 bankruptcy cases in France that started between 2000 and 2019. The reform unambiguously reduces Type 1 errors while having no impact on Type 2 errors. Post-merger court behavior is determined more by that of the absorbing court than by that of the absorbed one. |
| Keywords: | Corporate Bankruptcy, Commercial Courts |
| JEL: | G33 K22 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bfr:banfra:1015 |
| By: | Benjamin W. Arold (University of Cambridge); Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich); W. Bentley MacLeod (Yale University); Suresh Naidu (Columbia University) |
| Abstract: | Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) specify the contractual rights of unionized workers, but their full legal content has not yet been analyzed by economists. This paper develops novel natural language methods to analyze the empirical determinants and economic value of these rights using a new collection of 30, 000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015. We parse legally binding rights (e.g., Òworkers shall receive. . . Ó) and obligations (e.g., Òthe employer shall provide. . . Ó) from contract text, and validate our measures through evaluation of clause pairs and comparison to firm surveys on HR practices. Using timevarying province-level variation in labor income tax rates, we find that higher taxes increase the share of worker-rights clauses while reducing pre-tax wages in unionized firms, consistent with a substitution effect away from taxed wages toward untaxed rights. Further, an exogenous increase in the value of outside options (from a leave-one-out instrument for labor demand) increases the share of worker rights clauses in CBAs. Combining the regression estimates, we infer that a one-standard-deviation increase in worker rights is valued at about 5.7% of wages. |
| Date: | 2025–10–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2468 |
| By: | Haoyi Zhang; Tianyi Zhu |
| Abstract: | This paper makes the opaque data market in the AI economy empirically legible for the first time, constructing a computational testbed to address a core epistemic failure: regulators governing a market defined by structural opacity, fragile price discovery, and brittle technical safeguards that have paralyzed traditional empirics and fragmented policy. The pipeline begins with multi-year fieldwork to extract the market's hidden logic, and then embeds these grounded behaviors into a high-fidelity ABM, parameterized via a novel LLM-based discrete-choice experiment that captures the preferences of unsurveyable populations. The pipeline is validated against reality, reproducing observed trade patterns. This policy laboratory delivers clear, counter-intuitive results. First, property-style relief is a false promise: ''anonymous-data'' carve-outs expand trade but ignore risk, causing aggregate welfare to collapse once external harms are priced in. Second, social welfare peaks when the downstream buyer internalizes the full substantive risk. This least-cost avoider approach induces efficient safeguards, simultaneously raising welfare and sustaining trade, and provides a robust empirical foundation for the legal drift toward two-sided reachability. The contribution is a reproducible pipeline designed to end the reliance on intuition. It converts qualitative insight into testable, comparative policy experiments, obsoleting armchair conjecture by replacing it with controlled evidence on how legal rules actually shift risk and surplus. This is the forward-looking engine that moves the field from competing intuitions to direct, computational analysis. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.26727 |