Empirical Legal Studies

Potential Research Projects

While The De-licensing of Occupations in the United States: A Shifting Trend?, by Robert Thornton (Lehigh—Business) et al., is a brief and purely descriptive paper, it identifies a timely topic and, in so doing, also identifies possible future empirical projects.

While a traditional focus for economists, “occupational licensing has begun to attract a growing and sometimes vocal stream of critics.” The standard set of criticisms are relatively well-rehearsed. “It has been alleged that too many occupations now require a license to practice and that the requirements for attaining a license in terms of costs and length of training are often excessive. Complaints have also been made that higher prices for the services provided by licensed practitioners are too often the result, and that the benefits to consumers in terms of higher quality are either small or nonexistent. Finally, it has been charged that excessive licensing has resulted in adverse effects on employment opportunities, intergenerational mobility, and worker mobility, especially for those with lower levels of education.”

While the state legislatures have been slow to respond to such critiques, since 2011 state legislative responses have accelerated. “The result has been that 35 occupations have become delicensed in a total of seven states over the past five years.” While this paper only sets out to identify where de-licensing efforts have succeeded, the paper’s sourcing also identifies possible avenues of empirical research down the road assessing, e.g., the costs and benefits incident to occupational licensing requirements and delicensing.

Tobacco Products, Taxes, and Substitution Effects

Variation in e-cigarette taxation supplies potentially rich research opportunities for studies of the on-the-ground effects of tax policy. In this spirit, The Effects of E-Cigarette Taxes on E-Cigarette Prices and Tobacco Product Sales: Evidence from Retail Panel Data, by Chad Cotti (Univ. Wisc-Oshkosh--economics) et al., estimates the effects of "e-cigarette taxes enacted in eight states and two large counties on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products." (One critical data limitation is the study's reliance on e-cigarette data that excludes sales through specialty vape shops and online sales.) The intersection of two core findings help frame what the authors define as a "detrimental unintended consequence of e-cigarette taxes."

One key finding is that "e-cigarette taxes are over-shifted to consumer prices, which is most likely in a market with high concentration." A second key finding is that "e-cigarettes are elastic goods and their use substantially reduces cigarette sales." However, "a 1% increase in e-cigarette taxes increases cigarette sales by about 0.14%.” (emphasis added) What these two findings imply is that even well-intentioned efforts to dampen e-cigarette use (especially among teens and young adults) through tax policy may well induce for some a migration from e-cigarettes to even more harmful cigarettes.

Data Resources Courtesy of the APSA Law & Courts Section

Our good friends and political science colleagues over at the APSA's Law & Courts Section recently updated the Section's website (click here). What is especially helpful is a sub-page (here) that provides links to the leading court data sets (SCOTUS, CA, district courts, as well as state supreme courts) along with related data assets (e.g., Martin-Quinn Scores, Judicial Common Space Scores).

Matthew McCubbins (1956-2021)

It is with sadness that I note the passing of a friend and colleague Matthew McCubbins.

Bridge Ideal Points--2021 Update

Michael Bailey (Georgetown--Govt.) has updated the Bridge Ideal Points estimates (click here) to cover years 1950 through 2020. These Ideal point estimates include the Supreme Court, presidential, and congressional ideology estimates and are designed to facilitate inter-institutional and cross-temporal comparisons.

While the Bridge Ideal Points compete somewhat with the Martin-Quinn scores in the literature, the two sets of ideology estimates correlate reasonably highly with one another. Despite the overlap, these two ideology estimates differ in two important ways.First, "Bridge Ideal Points are designed to be intertemporally comparable. Martin and Quinn scores assume the ideological cutpoints of Supreme Court cases are drawn from a common distribution across years, which makes them less comparable across time when the case load changes." Second, while Martin and Quinn scores only cover the Supreme Court justices, Bridge Ideal Points for justices are comparable to Bridge Ideal Points for presidents and members of Congress as well.

Regardless of one's preference, efforts to estimate justice ideology remain a staple in the judicial decisionmaking literature.