Empirical Legal Studies

D-I-D Slides

Compliments of Clyde Schechter (a prominent blogger on the Stata List) those interested in a very helpful set of basic difference-in-difference slides can click here. The slides summarize various D-I-D basic designs, key assumptions, threats to validity, and related matters.

2018 CLEA--Call For Papers

The Canadian Law & Economics Association (CLEA) will hold its annual conference at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law on September 21-22, 2018. Professor Robert E. Scott (Columbia) will deliver the Tory Law & Economics Public Lecture. The conference provides an opportunity for law and economic scholars to present new, original research in areas including artificial intelligence, bankruptcy, competition, corporate law, development, environmental, finance, judicial behavior, property, and tax. For those interested, more information on CLEA’s call for papers can be found here.

Please note that the submission deadline is July 31, 2018.

Death Penalty Administration in Black and White

Sophisticated empirical work on disparities with the administration of capital punishment began in earnest decades ago. In the mid-1980s Baldus et al. (and others) made important insights by delving into procedural disparities that precede prosecutorial charging decisions and jurors’ sentencing decisions. In the runup to the McClesky decision, Baldus and Woodworth documented that "a Black defendant accused of killing a White victim in Georgia was 3.1 times more likely than any defendant accused of killing a Black victim in the years immediately after Gregg."

A recent paper by Fagan (Columbia) and Geller (NYU-Sociology), Police, Race, and the Production of Capital Homicides, advances our understanding by taking a step backwards. Specifically, the authors argue that the "emphasis on prosecutorial decisions overlooks a critical stage in the production of death penalty cases: police investigations and arrests. Prosecutors select cases for capital prosecution from a pool of intentional homicides created predominantly through police investigations and arrests. To an extent previously unknown, disparities in charging may reflect antecedent racial biases in the production of capital-eligible homicides by the police. That production process is our focus.” An excerpted abstract follows.

“Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to an earlier stage of capital case processing: the production of capital-eligible cases beginning with the identification of potential defendants by the police. It seeks to trace these sentencing disparities to examining earlier stages in the processing of homicides. Using data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, we examine every homicide reported between 1976 and 2009, and find that homicides with white victims are significantly more likely to be “cleared” by the arrest of a suspect than are homicides with minority victims. We estimate a series of hierarchical regressions to show that a substantial portion of this disparity is explained by social and demographic characteristics of the county in which homicides take place. Most notably, counties with large concentrations of minority residents have lower clearance rates than do predominantly white counties; however, county characteristics do not fully explain the observed race-of-victim disparities.”