Empirical Legal Studies

How to Deal with an Ordinal Dep Var When You Need/Want to Include Fixed Effects?

A recent question posed on StataList has stimulated an interesting discussion (here) as well as a call for FE ordinal models. The specific question:

"So to sum up my question: Is it possible to 'argue' that my ordinal dependent variables can be treated as continuous and I can therefore use FE for them as well? If yes - could you point me towards the appropriate literature/methodology? Or is this not possible and I need to use logit/probit for the ordinal dependent variables?"

The core of the question--can an ordinal dependent variable be treated as "continuous"--comes up most frequently in the survey context where a response involves a Likert Scale (typically a 5- or 7-point scale -- or an even-numbered scale that pushes respondents off a mid-point response). While reasonable minds can--and do--differ on what modeling options may plausibly exist, at the very least, and as a first step, a researcher would need to closely examine how any ordinal dependent variable distributes as this may itself limit model selection options.

Northwestern University Law Review--2nd Annual Empirical Legal Scholarship Issue: Call for Papers

The Northwestern University Law Review is pleased to announce its second annual issue dedicated to empirical legal scholarship, to be published in Spring 2020. We welcome pieces making use of any and all empirical tools—including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods—to illuminate and engage questions of legal interest.

The Northwestern University Law Review accepts empirical articles on an exclusive basis only. The exclusive submission window for the 2020 empirical issue will run from March 15–April 15, 2019. Participating authors must agree to withhold the manuscript from submission to any other publications until receiving a decision from us. All publication decisions will be released no later than July 31, 2019.

Interested authors must submit articles and essays via email to Empirical Articles Editor Kerri Howard (at: kerri.howard@nlaw.northwestern.edu).

Please submit the article as a .doc or .docx file with a cover letter or similar email; CV; and, if desired, supporting materials. More information about submission requirements and the empirical selection process is available here.

CELS 2019 -- Call For Papers

Spearheaded by CELS 2019 co-presidents David Bjerk, Eric Helland, and Dan Krauss, Claremont McKenna College and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) are pleased to announce the 14th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) on November 15-16, 2019, in Claremont, California.

CELS is a highly regarded interdisciplinary gathering that draws researchers from across the United States and the world, bringing together scholars in law, economics, political science, psychology, policy analysis, and other fields who are interested in the empirical analysis of law and legal institutions. Papers are selected through a peer review process, and discussion at the conference includes assigned commentators and audience questions.

CELS will consider empirical papers spanning all areas of empirical legal studies. Authors are encouraged to submit works-in-progress; however, submissions should be completed drafts that include principal results. Submitted papers must be unpublished (and expected to be unpublished at the time of the conference). If accepted, authors will have an opportunity to submit a revised draft prior to the conference for presentation and discussion. Please note that accepted papers will be made available to all conference participants.

For general information about the CELS 2019 conference (click here); to submit a paper (click here).  Please note the paper submission deadline: June 21, 2019 (midnight, Pacific Time).

"Significance" in Marginal Effects v. "Original" Model

A lively discussion (here) on the Stata list takes up the question: "This variable has significant effects in the original (logit/probit/heckprobit/whatever) model. But its marginal effect is not significant. Why?"

As the ensuing (and on-going) discussion makes clear, this nuanced discussion involves, among other things, careful attention to precisely what specific hypotheses are being tested in a margins specification versus an "original" specification.

Data on Post-Conviction Criminal Expungement

As briefly described in a recent NYT op-ed (on March 20, 2019; link here for those who can get behind the NYT pay-wall), Professors J.J. Prescott (Mich.) and Sonja Starr (Mich.) submit an increasingly discussed policy--a push for increased expungements of criminal convictions--to data. As the paper notes, motivating the increased policy attention to expungements are concerns about "reentry barriers faced by people with criminal records." Contributing to an under-developed empirical literature on the possible impacts of criminal expungements is a paucity of public information on expunged criminal records. In Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study, Prescott and Starr lever their access to "complete, deidentified criminal records from the Michigan State Police on all individuals who had obtained criminal record “set-asides” (Michigan’s term for record-sealing) as of March 2014, as well as full criminal history records for much larger comparison groups of individuals with convictions that were not set aside."

The paper's careful attention to research design addresses one (but not all) traditional threat to identification posed by selection bias. By adopting a within-person design--and not comparisons between those received expungements and those who did not--the specification's identification is not distorted by the likely (almost assured) systematic differences between expungee and non-expungee sub-groups. That said, even the paper's within group design can not fully blunt potential distortions owing to variations in the timing of an individuals' expungement application. A summary of key findings is included in the abstract.

"Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge of legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. We were able to obtain access to deidentified data that overcomes that problem, and we use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable non-recipients. We offer three key sets of empirical findings. First, among those legally eligible for expungement, just 6.5% obtain it within five years of eligibility. Drawing on patterns in our data as well as interviews with expungement lawyers, we point to reasons for this serious “uptake gap.” Second, those who do obtain expungement have extremely low subsequent crime rates, comparing favorably to the general population—a finding that defuses a common public-safety objection to expungement laws. Third, those who obtain expungement experience a sharp upturn in their wage and employment trajectories; on average, within two years, wages go up by 25% versus the pre-expungement trajectory, an effect mostly driven by unemployed people finding jobs and very minimally employed people finding steadier or higher-paying work."