Empirical Legal Studies

Data on Health Care Quality's Imperviousness to Tort Reform

A recent paper by a Cornell colleague, Mike Frakes, will interest tort scholars (as well as health law specialists and economists). In Does Medical Malpractice Deter? The Impact of Tort Reforms and Malpractice Standard Reforms on Healthcare Quality, Mike exploits data from National Hospital Discharge Surveys to assess the impact of various tort reforms on avoidable hospitalization rates. Frakes finds only "modest" evidence of deterrence. The abstract follows.

"Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in the theoretical justification for medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on its existence and scope. Using data from the 1979 to 2005 National Hospital Discharge Surveys and drawing on an extensive set of variations in various tort measures (e.g., damage caps) and malpractice standard-of-care rules (Frakes 2012a), I estimate a small and statistically insignificant relationship between malpractice forces and two metrics of health care quality emphasized by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: (1) avoidable hospitalization rates (reflective of outpatient quality) and (2) inpatient mortality rates for selected medical conditions. At most, the evidence implies an arguably modest degree of malpractice-induced deterrence. For instance, at one end of the 95% confidence interval, the lack of a non-economic damages cap (indicative of higher malpractice pressure) is associated with only a 4% decrease in avoidable hospitalizations."

"False" Confessions, Plea Bargains, Experimental Designs & IRB

A recent paper now circulating on SSRN, The Innocent Defendant’s Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study of Plea Bargaining’s Innocence Problem, intrigues for an array of reasons. The subject matter--defendants' willingness to plead to offenses they did not commit incident to a plea bargain--certainly provokes. Also notable is the research design employed. The researchers, Lucian Dervan (S. Ill.) and Vanessa Edkins (psychology, Florida Tech.), constructed an experiment in which college students actually felt they were "accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board." The study involved "dozens of college students, and taking place over several months ... revealed that plea bargaining’s innocence problem is not isolated to an obscure and rare set of cases." Finally, insofar as this experiment involved human subjects, that the researchers managed to get their research project through IRB struck me as something of a minor miracle. An excerpted abstract follows.

"Strikingly, the authors’ study found that over half of the participants were willing to falsely admit guilt in return for a perceived benefit. This finding not only brings finality to the long-standing debate regarding the possible extent of plea bargaining’s innocence problem, but also ignites a fundamental constitutional question regarding an institution the Supreme Court reluctantly approved of in 1970 in return for an assurance it would not be used to induce innocent defendants to falsely admit guilt."

The Court, Legitimacy, and Political Perceptions

The Court's recent ACA decision propelled attention to perceptions of Court legitimacy. Erik Girvan (Oregon) pointed me to a post by a pair of political scientists at Duke, Chris Johnston and D. Sunshine Hillygus, who consider  "Given that the Court ruled in favor of the constitutionality of the ACA bill, we were interested to see how Court legitimacy would vary across Democrats and Republicans. Would Democrats show higher levels of legitimacy because of the ruling? Conversely, would Republicans show higher legitimacy in spite of the ruling, because the Court remains relatively conservative overall?"

According to Johnston and Hillygus, "the present data support the conclusion that Supreme Court legitimacy is, to a meaningful extent, conditional on political predispositions as they relate to the output of the Court; however, what matters is how citizens perceive the Court’s output, and whether those perceptions are in line with their own preferences or not."

Yale to offer a Ph.D in Law

Yale Law School will begin offering a Ph.D in law, with the first incoming class arriving in Fall 2013.  I learnd of this from a WSJ story; the Yale press release is here.  From the latter:

"Because the level of the scholarship expected of entry-level law professors has risen quite dramatically, increasing numbers of law professors now pursue Ph.D.’s in allied disciplines like economics, history, philosophy, or political science. Because such disciplines train students in standards and questions that are different from those of the law, the natural next step for the legal academy is to create our own Ph.D. program that can focus on the questions and practices of the law itself. Students obtaining a Ph.D. in law may, of course, engage in interdisciplinary studies, but their work will be anchored in the framework of legal scholarship." (Dean Robert Post)

The program is clearly designed to prepare individuals for careers on law faculty; and, interestingly, the program is only open to individuals who have already received a J.D. This makes it an interesting move by Yale, both from a "possible pool of candidates" perspective and (more broadly) given some of the other changes in law schools recently (and their likely knock-on effects for faculty hiring).  I'll have to mull this last bit over a bit more before commenting further, but my knee-jerk reaction is that this will further polarize the ranks of law school faculties with respect to credentals, focus, etc.

In related news, Gordon Silverstein, a political scientist formerly at (inter alia) Berkeley, will assume the position of Assistant Dean of Graduate Programs at YLS, effective Monday. He'll be in charge of the new Ph.D., as well as existing the LL.M. and J.S.D. programs. Congratulations, Gordon!

 

 

Always More Room on the ELS "Bandwagon"

Interesting post (and related discussion) over at PrawfsBlawg involving Martin Pritikin's (Whittier) initial "jump" onto the ELS "bandwagon" and into ELS scholarship. Notable to me is Martin's willingness to undertake the "heroic" task of data creation (rather than secondary analysis of existing data sets). It is also hearting to hear reports from participants about the efficacy of the growing number of empirical legal studies workshops. Finally, the comments' helpfulness evidences how the ELS community stands ready to assist those willing to engage.

Speaking of Supreme Court Justices and Politics

Yesterday's end-of-Term flurry of Supreme Court opinions prompted annual public attention to the Court and its work. As people discuss whether Justice Roberts sought to avoid politics by siding with the Court's liberal wing or, instead, yielded to political pressure to change his vote in the ACA case, an interesting paper by Ross Stolzenberg (Chicago--Sociology) and Jim Lindgren (Northwestern), Retirement and Death in Office of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, warrants attention.

As the paper's abstract explains, the paper's "[M]odels build on prior multistate labor force status studies, and data permit an unusually clear distinction between voluntary and "induced" retirement. Using data on every justice from 1789 through 2006, with robust, cluster-corrected, discrete-time, censored, event-history methods, we (1) estimate retirement effects of pension eligibility, age, health, and tenure on the timing of justices' retirements and deaths in office, (2) resolve decades of debate over the politicized departure hypothesis that justices tend to alter the timing of their retirements for the political benefit or detriment of the incumbent president, (3) reconsider the nature of rationality in retirement decisions, and (4) consider the relevance of organizational conditions as well as personal circumstances to retirement decisions."

The paper finds that Supreme Court justices do tend to act politically in one respect: The Justices tend to retire or take senior status strategically to favor the party of the president who appointed them.

Judicial Decisionmaking, With a Twist

While judicial decisionmaking studies are standard fare in the ELS world, a recent paper by Laarni Escresa (Hamburg & Bologna) and Nuno Garoupa (Ill.), Judicial Politics in Unstable Democracies: The Case of the Philippine Supreme Court, an Empirical Analysis 1986-2010, adds a novel and interesting wrinkle. Specifically, the paper, forthcoming at 3 Asian Journal of Law and Economics (2012), applies standard models to judicial decisions from a foreign (Philippines) unstable democracy. The abstract follows.

"In this paper we investigate empirically the determinants of judicial behavior at the Philippine Supreme Court in the period 1986-2010. Our results show an important alignment between individual Justices and the interests of the presidential appointers, although it varies across presidential terms. We discuss these empirical results in the context of the Philippine unstable democracy and the implications for the comparative literature on judicial behavior."

External Validity: Comparing Psychology Laboratory and Field Studies

A hugely important topic for empirical psychology is the external validity of laboratory-based studies. "A widely-held assumption within the social sciences is that the rigor of experimental research is purchased at the price of generalizability of results," and that "this trade-off plays out most directly in those fields that use laboratory experiments to study how humans navigate complex social environments." In Revisiting Truth or Triviality: The External Validity of Research in the Psychological Laboratory, Gregory Mitchell (UVa) revisits an earlier paper (Anderson et al., 1999), compares results from lab and field studies, and finds, in part, that the external validity of psych lab studies "differed considerably" among various psychological subfields. The abstract follows.

"Anderson, Lindsay, and Bushman (1999) compared effect sizes from laboratory and field studies of 38 research topics compiled in 21 meta-analyses and concluded that psychological laboratories produced externally valid results. A replication and extension of Anderson et al. (1999) using 217 lab-field comparisons from 82 meta-analyses found that the external validity of laboratory research differed considerably by psychological subfield, research topic, and effect size. Laboratory results from industrial–organizational psychology most reliably predicted field results, effects found in social psychology laboratories most frequently changed signs in the field (from positive to negative or vice versa), and large laboratory effects were more reliably replicated in the field than medium and small laboratory effects."

Some Data on College Athletics & Costs

To be sure, the proper role of "big-time" athletic programs in a college environment is both contested and complex (to say nothing of Title IX exposure). As BCS college presidents contemplate formalizing a "playoff" system for D1 football, those who deny the vast economic implications blink at reality. While these "economic implications" persist as the subject of debate, however, many of the debates take place without the benefit of data. A recent paper by Leo H. Kahane (Providence College--Economics), The Estimated Rents of a Top-Flight Men’s College Hockey Player, brings much-needed data (and analysis) to this debate, at least as it relates to the economic impact of "top-flight" D1 college hockey players.

While the paper side-steps critical accounting assumptions, Kahane exploits a panel data set (2005--2008) involving teams in the top four NCAA D1 college hockey conferences. While revenue generated among the colleges differ "substantially," the paper concludes that:

"Empirical results show that top-flight college hockey players generate between $131 and $165 thousand in added revenues to schools. According to the NCAA the average value of an athletic scholarship is between $14 thousand (for in-state public schools) to $32 thousand (private schools) in 2008. This implies that a premium college hockey player generates rents in excess of $100 thousand per year for the typical institution."

Position available - Yale Law Library

John Nunn at Yale passes along the following announcement:

"Yale Law Library seeks an Empirical Research Librarian. The Empirical Research Librarian occupies a new position at the law library and supports the empirical research endeavors of the Yale Law School's faculty and students. Among the responsibilities of the position are assisting members of the community with developing empirical research plans, data analysis including regression analysis, data interpretation, and visual presentation. The Empirical Research Librarian will also select and acquire data resources in law and related disciplines in conjunction and cooperation with the University's Science and Social Science Data Librarian.

More details about the position and information about how to apply for it can be found here (17112BR)."