Empirical Legal Studies

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.

Nitty-Gritty Practical Tips: Importing Excel Spreadsheets Into Stata (12)

Many--but not all--data sets analyzed in Stata began as Excel spreadsheets. To get to Stata's analytics requires importing Excel files. All too often, what should be a straight-forward task becomes anything but. A recent post on the Stata Blog walks readers through (with helpful screen-shot pictures) the data import process.

The "import excel" command in Stata 12 can help import Excel files into Stata by addressing two specific issues. First, Excel files often contain header and footer information in the first few and last few rows of a sheet, and you may not want that information loaded. A second common problem is that many column labels used in Excel spreadsheet files are invalid as Stata variable names (and therefore cannot be loaded into Stata).

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)."

 

Helpful "How-To" Guide for Using Adobe Illustrator to Enhance Graphics

As I am partial to elegance and subtly when it comes to graphs, tables, etc., the overly-complicated graphics command structures in many of the leading software packages can quickly frustrate even experienced users. Moreover, transforming graphical output into useful forms, such as PowerPoint slides, generates its own set of challenges.

Thus, I was delighted to find over at the Social Science Statistics Blog a link to a wonderfully helpful slideshow by Matthew Sigal (York), replete with practical tips on how to post-process graphs with Adobe Illustrator. Though the examples make specific reference to graphs produced in R, the advice is easily translated into other statistical software packages. Finally, while York's main point is to assist with the concrete task of enlisting Adobe into the service of better graphics, one implicit and broader point involves the importance of attending to the visual display of data.