Empirical Legal Studies

Panel Data Sets & Serial Correlation and Heteroskedasticity Challenges

For those working with a panel data set noted for its "large N, small T," a recent discussion here (from the StataList) might help save some time when it comes to working through challenges posed by serialcorrelation and heteroskedasticity. While these issues are especially common in corp finance and securities papers, as the latter comments in the discussion imply the magnitude of the problem (for 'short panel' data sets) remains somewhat of a contested point.

Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Article Prize -- Update

Each year, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) awards the Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Prize for the best poster presented at the Conference. Inasmuch as last year’s Conference was postponed due to the pandemic, this year the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies will award the Theodore Eisenberg Memorial Article Prize to the best paper submitted to JELS in 2021 and accepted for publication. The prize will be judged by the JELS editors. To honor our late colleague’s strong and enduring interest in mentoring and developing new empirical scholars, we will heavily favor submissions by early-career scholars in making this assessment. We will automatically consider any paper submitted between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021, as eligible for consideration. The award will be noted in the volume in which the article is published and an announcement sent to the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.

Data Familiarization/Visualization

A recent post by Jessica Hullman (here) served as my most recent periodic reminder about the enduring need for folks (myself included) to take a few, basic, simple steps to become more familiar with the underlying structure of and relationships among critical data points. Tukey's elegant tables and figures notwithstanding, what is perhaps more important is what follows from Tukey's general impulse: Sometimes simple data plots can unlock key analytic insights. And even if such insights aren't necessary for the researcher, readers' (and journal editors') interests should not be taken for granted.

In trying to explain why researchers might ignore--or bypass--simple initial data visualization/familiarization steps, Hullman points to "latent beliefs that plotting data is somehow inferior to anything that feels more like math. And because making plots for the sake of checking what the data look like or discovering things you didn’t expect seems disconnected and even distracting from the ultimate goal of fitting some model." That such beliefs may be entirely understandable, however, does not detract from their potential harm. It remains awfully difficult to overestimate the value of simple, Tukey-inspired data familiarization/visualization efforts.

Another Neat Stata Output "Trick"

A long-time ELS Blog reader, Jeff Yates (SUNY-Binghamton), alerted me to another under-appreciated command that can make life a bit easier for those needing/desiring to convert Stata results into Word docs.  asdoc is a Stata program that makes it easy to send output from Stata to MS Word by creating publication-ready tables from such Stata commands as summarize, correlate, tabstat, cross-tabs, regressions, t-tests, flexible table, as well as others. More information can be found here. To access (or update) the command:

ssc install asdoc, update

JELS' Research Notes and Datasets Section

If memory serves, a suggestion in 2016 (or so) from Bernie Black (Northwestern) and Marty Wells (Cornell-Statistics) to the JELS editors set into motion a chain of events that culminated in 2017 with the introduction of the "Research Notes and Datasets" section in JELS. The core motivation behind introducing a new paper "genre" for JELS was a fundamental belief that dataset construction, data sharing, and methods testing are a vital part of ELS' growth. We felt that a new section in JELS would help contribute to the realization of such beliefs. What we did not fully appreciate or anticipate, however, was the response. Since the Research Notes and Datasets section's launch in 2017 JELS has already published a number of important papers, including:

Patent Similarity Data and Innovation Metrics, by Ryan Whalen Alina Lungeanu Leslie DeChurch Noshir Contractor JELS 2020 (September). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12261

Developing High‐Quality Data Infrastructure for Legal Analytics: Introducing the Israeli Supreme Court Database, by Keren Weinshall Lee Epstein JELS 2020 (June). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12250

The German Federal Courts Dataset 1950–2019: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data, by Hanjo Hamann Sokol JELS 2019 (September). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12230

Competition Law Gone Global: Introducing the Comparative Competition Law and Enforcement Datasets, by Anu Bradford Adam S. Chilton Christopher Megaw Nathaniel Sokol JELS 2019 (June). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12215

Accuracy and Fairness for Juvenile Justice Risk Assessments, by Richard Berk JELS 2019 (March). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12206

Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA)—A Structured Corpus for the Text‐as‐Data Analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements, by Wolfgang Alschner Julia Seiermann Dmitriy Skougarevskiy  JELS 2018 (September). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12189

Medical Liability Insurance Premia: 1990–2016 Dataset, with Literature Review and Summary Information, by Bernard Black Jeanette W. Chung Jeffrey Traczynski Victoria Udalova Sonal Vats, JELS 2017 (March). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12146