Empirical Legal Studies

2019 CELS--Date and Location

On the heels of a stunningly successful 2018 CELS, hosted by the University of Michigan Law School and co-organized by Professors James R. Hines Jr., J.J. Prescott, and Sonja B. Starr, I wanted to alert those interested that the 2019 CELS, scheduled for November 8-9, 2019, will be hosted by Claremont McKenna College (Calif.) and co-organized by Professors David Bjerk, Eric Helland, and Dan Krauss.

Data & Property Rights

While the array of issues incident to "data" and property rights (or "ownership") continues to grow both in number and complexity, many of the immediate, practical questions relate to the evolving relation between empirical scholars and their data sets and journal editors when it comes to the manuscript review process. A wider-angle lens, however, as well as an international perspective, are developed in a recent, brief working paper/report, Data Ownership. In it, Teresa Scassa (Ottawa) takes up broader questions concerning data "ownership," what ownership may mean, and how whatever it may mean can vary across jurisdictions. While certainly not the last word on these complex issues, an interesting take and perspective on a set of issues that will not likely go away anytime soon.

Extended Submission Deadline--Program on Empirical Legal Studies (PELS)--2019 Replication Conference

Extended Submission Deadline: Friday, Nov. 16, 2018, midnight (Pacific time).

I'm delighted to announce that Claremont McKenna College's Program on Empirical Legal Studies (PELS) is accepting paper proposals for its Second Annual Replication Conference, scheduled for Friday, April 26, 2019, in Claremont, CA.

The call for paper proposals notes: "We are currently soliciting proposals that detail a plan to replicate an important study in law and economics/empirical legal studies. We welcome submissions using all methodologies and the conference will include a range of replication methodologies. We encourage proposals from teams consisting of a faculty member and one or more graduate students, in recognition of the fact that replication studies are also an excellent form of pedagogy."

For those interested click here for additional information.

"Driving While White" (During Stressful Budgetary Times)

Much of late has been made of: 1) "problematic" policing in general and 2) police activity that appears to be "budget-driven." A recent paper by Elliot Ash (Warwick) et al., Local Public Finance and Discriminatory Policing: Evidence from Traffic Stops in Missouri, takes an interesting step at trying to connect some of these dots.

As to "problematic" policing practices, the paper references a "large literature has documented that traffic police disproportionately target black and Hispanic drivers when making stops." Another seemingly unrelated literature explores the "public-finance motivations underlying aggressive policing. It is well-documented that local governments rely on revenue from traffic tickets, and officials often look to this source of revenue to help overcome budget shortfalls."

This paper sets out to empirically explore 'the intersection of race, policing, and this form of latent taxation, to determine whether the burden to close budget gaps falls disproportionately on non-white motorists and pedestrians." Specifically, the authors assess whether "police officers’ ticketing behaviors are discriminatory, and in particular, whether the disparity in ticketing changes when a municipality is faced with governmental pressures to increase ticketing revenue."

To do so the paper exploits two main sources of data. One source involves Missouri government finance data. A second source involves "agency-level traffic stops data, used to construct measures of traffic enforcement effort across races. There are 769 agencies in the sample, for which we have 13 years of annual panel data from 2000 through 2012."

While part of the paper's findings will unlikely surprise many, another part likely will. First, as it relates to "public-finance [or budget] motivated police conduct," the authors find that a "decrease in government revenue growth the previous year is associated with a higher citation rate." Second, as it relates to discriminatory policing, the authors find that this budget-stress-motivated increased enforcement activity (tickets and arrests) fell disproportionately on white drivers and not on non-white drivers. The paper's abstract follows.

"This paper provides evidence of racial variation in local governments’ traffic enforcement responses to budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri for the years 2001 through 2014. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates. In addition, we find that there is an increase in traffic-stop arrests. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among white (rather than black or Hispanic) drivers. This statistical difference is robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates for traffic stops and to the inclusion of local population features interacted with year. These results are consistent with a model where traffic police selectively target higher-income drivers to compensate for budget stress. Also consistent with this view, we find that the racial difference in citation and arrest rates is highest where the white-to-black income ratio is highest."