Empirical Legal Studies

Options for Small and Unbalanced ("Rare Events") Data Sets

While relogit is a standard "go-to" Stata command when a data set includes "rare events," a threat of bias is enhanced if rare events derive from a "small sample." While bootstraping may be an option for some, a recent Stata listserv discussion (here) emphasizes a pair of commands -- firthlogit and exlogit -- that might make sense for others. Relatedly, Prof. Williams (ND-sociology) helpfully delves into the challenge a bit more comprehensively (here).

George L. Priest (1947-2024)

When my former mentor, Ted Eisenberg (1947-2014), periodically reminded me that "it is difficult to overestimate the influence of selection effects in litigation," his point of reference was a seminal 1984 article, The Selection of Disputes for Litigation. Sadly, one-half of the "Priest-Klein" hypothesis, George L. Priest, the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics at Yale Law School, passed away recently.

Yale Law School's memorial notice echoes what Ted emphasized for decades, "[Priest's] 1984 article (with UCLA economist Benjamin Klein) “The Selection of Disputes for Litigation,” revolutionized theories of the common law and engendered decades of inquiry regarding the probability of litigation outcomes. The article presented what became known as the ‘Priest-Klein hypothesis’ and introduced the concept of selection bias into legal literature.” Empirical scholars, and many others, mourn Prof. Priest's passing.

Job Opportunity of Note (& ELS' Expanding Footprint)

While my proverbial "gaze" typically fixes on scholarship, "ELS-adjacent" issues periodically catch my eye as well. In this spirit, I recently came across a "real-world" (that is, non-academic) job opportunity that might interest statistics-savvy post-docs (and others). The job posting also implies the possibility that ELS is expanding beyond its traditional academic "silo."

What I learned from the job posting includes that: 1) an "Quantitative Research Unit" operates within (and services) the New Jersey judiciary, and 2) this Unit is actively hiring a "Research Analyst Manager" (click here for a direct link to the job posting). According to the [NJ] Judiciary Research Manager, the Unit is looking to hire "an individual to lead the team doing research across the Civil Court and Family Court practice areas. This is a great opportunity to lead applied work in the Law and Courts arena that has near-immediate impact."

"T-Testing" Group Differences at Various Percentiles

While the standard t-test compares means, somewhat less clear is what to do if one wants to test, e.g., whether group differences at various percentiles achieve statistical significance. In a recent Statalist discussion (click here), the specific question posed involves an effort to determine whether “Black-White wealth differences at p10 (10^th percentile) and p90 (90^th percentile)” systematically vary.

Possible options, described in the responses, range from using the qreg and ttest commands.

Taxing Autonomy and Budget Volatility

While complaints from public entities about the policy challenges and harms incident to fiscal uncertainty attributable to budget volatility emerge on an almost annual basis, factors that inform budget volatility remain understudied. Moreover, the particular role that a public entity's taxing autonomy might play remains especially obscure in the empirical literature. However, a recent paper, Does Taxing Authority Help School Districts in Managing Revenue Volatility?, by Laiyang Ke (Ark. St. Univ.--Poli Sci), makes a helpful contribution.

The paper defines taxing autonomy in terms of the degree to which a subnational government (here, public school districts) controls their tax revenues. "Budget volatility" is understood as a function of a school district's "fluctuations and uncertainty in revenue streams and expenditure patterns." Notably, both concepts have particular traction in the US public school district context. First, school districts vary in terms of their taxing autonomy. Second, "previous research has shown that state and local government revenue volatility could lead to expenditure volatility, and uncertain spending fluctuations in school districts may impair education outcomes."

One of the paper's key contributions includes its proposed measure of school district taxing autonomy which draws from school district financial data from the 1998/1999 to 2018/2019 school years. The paper's two-pronged empirical execution features a correlated random effects model as well as D-I-D estimations. The paper's findings emphasize that "school districts with a higher degree of tax autonomy—specifically, those able to change tax rates—experience less current expenditure volatility than districts with lower degrees of tax autonomy." The abstract follows.

"This study examines the impact of tax autonomy on school district expenditure volatility in the U.S., where school districts differ in their ability to levy and adjust taxes, with some having full taxing authority and others relying on fixed appropriations or lacking control over tax rates. This research introduces a comprehensive index to measure taxing autonomy across districts and develops an ordinal classification based on this framework. Using finance data from 1998/1999 to 2018/2019 and difference-in-differences, the study investigates whether districts with higher tax autonomy experience lower expenditure volatility compared to those with limited or no tax authority. The findings reveal that districts with greater tax autonomy, particularly those able to adjust tax rates, exhibit less volatility in current expenditures. Additionally, during the Great Recession, districts with higher autonomy faced smaller cuts in current expenditures by increasing tax revenues, which helped protect educational inputs like pupil-teacher ratios."

With Apologies...

Now that some nettlesome technical web domain hosting/forwarding issues have finally been resolved, regularly blog posting will resume.