Deep IV in Law : Appellate Decisions and Texts Impact Sentencing in Trial Courts (Elements in Law, Economics and Politics)

Huang, Zhe/ Zhang, Xinyue/ Wang, Ruofan

Cambridge University Press（2022/08発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 75 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781009296373
• DDC分類 347.7324

Full Description

Do US Circuit Courts' decisions on criminal appeals influence sentence lengths imposed by US District Courts? This Element explores the use of high-dimensional instrumental variables to estimate this causal relationship. Using judge characteristics as instruments, this Element implements two-stage models on court sentencing data for the years 1991 through 2013. This Element finds that Democratic, Jewish judges tend to favor criminal defendants, while Catholic judges tend to rule against them. This Element also finds from experiments that prosecutors backlash to Circuit Court rulings while District Court judges comply. Methodologically, this Element demonstrates the applicability of deep instrumental variables to legal data.

Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Theoretical framework; 3. Dataset; 4. Empirical model; 5. Results; 6. On the practical use of Deep IV for law and economics; 7. Limitations from a computer science perspective; 8. Limitations from an economics perspective; 9. Potential future work; Appendix; References.