Volume 18, Issue 1

Spatial models, in the form of latent response theories (ideal point estimation), have been widely used to study the voting behavior of judges in collegial courts. In some specific institutional contexts, building coherent testable hypotheses with conventional methodology is challenging. We set up a non-parametric method to identify the number and nature of the latent ideological traits allegedly orienting judicial voting behavior in the absence of prior information regarding the nature of their preferences. We draw information from explorative cluster analysis conducted on votes cast by judges in the decisions of the court to construct priors in the context of Item Response Theory. We concentrate on the Brazilian Supreme Court in the period 2009–2018. We primarily find that votes express a split which groups judges into two distinct clusters. On one side, we find judges appointed further back in time and with longer tenure on the bench; on the other side, we observe judges more recently appointed and with shorter experience. Judges are likely to respond to the presidential appointer and to elements related to their origin, university education, and career background (aside from the guidance of their own experience). Our study provides an original empirical approach that is not limited to the Brazilian Supreme Court, but is suitable to investigate judicial voting behavior when the nature of potential ideological drivers is debatable, controversial, or unknown.

This article contributes to the literature addressing family influences on elite political behavior. By empirically assessing the influence of sibling gender on judicial decision-making, we are able to present evidence on the mechanism by which child, sibling and other relatives’ gender may influence elite political behavior. We build on a published dataset by mining various archival sources to compile data on the gender of judges’ siblings. We find no evidence that male judges’ votes on so-called “women’s issues” (employment discrimination based on gender or pregnancy, reproductive rights/abortion, and Title IX) are affected by whether they have a sister, and we are able to rule out large effects of a sibling’s gender on male and female judges’ votes. Our results imply that the relationship between family member gender and elite political behavior is driven by the desire to avoid costs of discrimination, rather than learning from family members.

Imprisonment and monetary rewards for non-convictions can similarly incentivize potential offenders to refrain from committing crime. Although imprisonment is expensive, it may still enjoy a cost advantage over rewards. This is because only detected criminals are imprisoned, whereas rewards need to be provided to the remaining, much larger, population. In this article, I demonstrate that the possible cost disadvantages of rewards are mitigated when people are offered a choice between an enforcement scheme involving no rewards and another involving rewards coupled with longer imprisonment sentences. Specifically, by using rewards in this manner, one can jointly reduce crime, time served per convict, and the tax burden of the criminal justice system, under the same conditions as one could by introducing rewards without choice in an environment where there is perfect detection. Moreover, monetary rewards provide incentives through wealth transfers, but imprisonment operates by destroying wealth. This leads choice-based reward regimes to be optimal unless the imprisonment elasticity of deterrence is higher than is empirically observed.

We explore English legal evolution by empirically investigating the relevance of late-medieval and early-modern legal ideas for caselaw development during the Industrial Revolution, an era of unprecedented societal change. To ascertain the prevalence of specific legal ideas in pre-1765 case reports, we draw on existing topic model estimates. We measure the relevance of those ideas for subsequent caselaw development using post-1764 citations to the pre-1765 cases. We show that deliberations on court cases heard between 1765 and 1870 systematically invoked a broad range of preexisting legal ideas. Strikingly, the strongest effects are exhibited by Coke-style analysis and precedent-based thought. A key legacy of early English caselaw therefore lay in bestowing modes of reasoning. The reason why a subset of preexisting legal ideas does not exert a detectable effect is that those ideas were generally no longer key to post-1764 legal disputes. Our approach to investigating legal development could be applied in many other contexts.

When conducting routine welfare analysis, regulators typically associate the exercise of market power to internal market characteristics such as market shares. However, some researchers argue that factors that are external to a market such as contact across markets may have an impact on market outcomes. An interesting but unanswered question is: how do cross-market factors such as multimarket contact affect consumer welfare? Using a nested logit demand model for air travel, we are able to monetarily estimate the consumer welfare effects of multimarket contact. We find that multimarket contact results in a consumer welfare loss of $0.57 per contact. Extrapolating this welfare cost across consumers and across products proves to be quite sizeable. These negative welfare effects are stronger in long haul markets.