Campaign Donations, Judicial Recusal, and Disclosure: A Field Experiment (with Jonathon S. Krasno, Donald P. Green, Costas Panagopoulos, and Michael Schwam-Baird)
Forthcoming in the Journal of Politics (2021)
[Formerly titled: Please Recuse Yourself: A Field Experiment Exploring the Relationship Between Campaign Donations and Judicial Recusal]
This research note reports results from a field experiment exploring how judicial behavior is affected by complaints about conflicts of interest. The conflicts of interest studied here arise in Wisconsin civil trial cases. Using public records, we identify instances in which one party’s attorney contributed to the presiding judge’s previous election campaign. We send a random subset of these judges a letter identifying the potential conflict and requesting recusal. We find that highlighting the potential conflict and asking judges to recuse sharply increases the rate at which judges disclose this relationship in court records but does not lead them to recuse. Treated judges are no more likely to disclose or recuse in subsequent cases that present a similar conflict of interest. This experiment, which is the first to test possible remedies to judicial conflicts of interest, suggests that light touch interventions are insufficient to change judges’ behavior.
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Compliance Experiments in the Field: Features, Limitations, and Examples
Forthcoming Chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (2021) (Daniel Sokol and Benjamin Van Rooij, eds.)
This chapter reviews the use, benefits, and limitations of using randomized field experiments (also known as randomized controlled trials, or RCTs) to study compliance. It begins with a brief primer on field experiments, outlining why randomized experiments are so valuable as a methodological tool and how the unique attributes of field experiments provide a distinct set of benefits from similar causality-focused approaches such as laboratory experiments and natural experiments. The chapter then highlights the important assumptions and practical difficulties required to conduct and analyze field experiments, paying particular attention to how these factors can be limitations when studying compliance. The chapter concludes by considering what sorts of compliance-related field experiments are possible by focusing on two areas in which their use is well established—tax compliance and criminal deterrence—and then highlights individual experiments testing a diversity of substantive topics less commonly explored by field experimentalists such as international law, food safety inspections, and the behavior of political elites.
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Randomness Pre-considered: Making Unbiased Causal Inference Through the Random Assignment of Judges
Published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2020)
– Recipient of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies Theodore Eisenberg Prize (2015)
This article contributes to the growing literature challenging the general assumption of and reliance on random judicial assignment by identifying common court procedures and practices that threaten unbiased causal inference. These “de‐randomizing” events, which include differing probabilities of assignment, post‐assignment judicial changes, nonrandom missingness, and nonrandom assignment itself, should be accounted for when making causal claims but are commonly either ignored or not even recognized by researchers utilizing random judicial assignment. The article explores how these de‐randomizing events violate the key empirical assumptions underlying randomized studies and offers methodological solutions. It also presents original data from a survey of the 30 largest U.S. state‐level criminal courts, outlining their assignment protocols and identifying the extent to which they feature the de‐randomizing events described in the article.
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Trial by Skype: A Causality-Oriented Replication Exploring the Use of Remote Video Adjudication in Immigration Removal Proceedings (with Joshua Mitts)
Published in the International Review of Law & Economics (2019)
In this article we present a replication of Ingrid Eagly’s 2015 empirical study on the use of remote video adjudication in immigration removal hearings. Eagly’s original study found that respondents who appear before judges via video feed fare significantly worse than those who appear in person. Our replication takes a three-tiered approach. First, we conduct a base-level reproduction of Eagly’s original empirical study using a reconstruction of her dataset and the same methodological approaches featured in her analysis. Second, we replicate Eagly’s data-cleaning and empirical analysis on a newer and larger removal dataset. Lastly, we conduct an expanded replication of her study using data-cleaning and methodological approaches that more fully consider the assumptions required to make identifiable causal claims in this procedural arena. Although our replications produce results that vary in magnitude with Eagly’s original results, the overall findings support her conclusion that the use of remote video adjudication disadvantages respondents at both the procedural and final stages of their removal hearings.
Replication Data: The starting dataset used in this project is proprietary and is only available through the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: //trac.syr.edu. However, a raw version of the data has recently been released by the US Executive Office for Immigration Review: //www.justice.gov/eoir.
Supplemental R Code: Data Cleaning, Data Analysis
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Field Experimentation and the Study of Law and Policy (with Donald Green)
Published in the Annual Review of Law & Social Science (2015)
Field experiments are randomized experiments that take place under naturalistic conditions. This research method is experiencing rapid growth throughout the social sciences and especially in legal studies, where it is used to rigorously evaluate policies and programs. We begin by charting the growth of field experimentation in law and legal studies, describing the statistical properties of experiments and discussing the practical threats that may undermine experiments conducted in field settings. Next, we review the experimental research literature in a variety of domains: legal institutions, including the judiciary, legislature, and legal profession; incentives, especially as they apply to tax compliance and business law; and laws and obligations, including legal code, policy, and legal theory. We conclude by highlighting some of the challenges that the experimental literature must confront if it is to speak convincingly to issues of law and policy.
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Importing Trust: A Field Experiment on Social Capital Levels in North Korean Refugees
Available in the BYU Scholars Archive (not peer reviewed)
This paper’s theory posits that nations struggling from chronically low levels of social trust can in some cases, import trust through facilitating investment to domestic business from foreign companies. I hypothesize that this foreign investment to private companies legitimizes those private companies in the eyes of potential domestic investors, thereby increasing domestic fiscal relationships and eventually, general social trust. By testing this hypothesis, I hope to shed light on the debate concerning domestic market strategies, particularly concerning developing nations. If nations can if fact ‘import’ trust through opening their domestic financial sectors to the international market, this research should serve as a strong argument in favor of such policies. To test this theory, I conducted a survey experiment using North Korean refugees living in South Korea and citizens of the Republic of India. Subjects were randomly assigned a hypothetical investment opportunity and asked how much money they would be willing to invest in one of three businesses (one that had received no investment, domestic investment, or foreign investment). I find that the effect of foreign investment on North Korean refugees’ and Indians’ fiscal trust is either negligible or inconclusive; the results from the Indian sample indicate that investment treatments have no substantive effect and the North Korean sample was too small to yield any statistically significant results.