Alexander Tabarrok

Does Three Strikes Deter?: A Nonparametric Estimation

We take advantage of the fortuitous randomization of trial outcome to provide a novel strategy to identify the deterrent effect exclusive of incapacitation. We compare the post-sentencing criminal activity of criminals who were convicted of a strikeable offense with those who were tried for a strikeable offense but convicted of a nonstrikeable offense. As a robustness check, we also make this comparison in states without three-strikes laws. The identification strategy lets us estimate the deterrent effect nonparametrically using data solely from the three-strikes era. We find that California’s three-strike legislation significantly reduces felony arrest rates among the class of criminals with two strikes by 17–20 percent.

Court Politics: The Political Economy of Tort Awards

We investigate the forces that explain why trial awards differ across the United States. In 23 states judges are elected and in 10 they are elected via partisan elections. Elections have two important effects. First, defendants are often out‐of‐state nonvoters while plaintiffs are typically in‐state voters. We predict, therefore, that elected judges will redistribute wealth from out‐of‐state businesses to in‐state plaintiffs. Second, the realities of campaign financing require judges to seek and accept campaign funding from trial lawyers, who uniformly are interested in larger awards. We hypothesize that these two forces cause awards to be larger in states where the judiciary is elected rather than appointed. We also hypothesize that the demand for redistribution will increase as poverty increases and, thus, that awards will be larger in states with greater poverty. Using a sample of over 7,000 cases across 48 of the 50 states, we find significant evidence in support of these hypotheses.

An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture

Artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of selling to the market and the nonpecuniary benefits of creating to please their own tastes. We examine how changes in wages, lump-sum income, and capital-labor ratios affect the artist’s pursuit of self-satisfaction versus market sales. Using our model of labor supply, we consider the economic forces behind the high/low culture split, why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant-garde than others, why so many artists dislike the market, and how economic growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of art.

The Private Provision of Public Goods via Dominant Assurance Contracts

Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy. The game is also modelled under incomplete information as a Bayesian-Nash game.

Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime"

Abstract We reexamine Mustard and Lott’s controversial study on the effect of “shall-issue” gun laws on crime using an empirical standard error function randomly generated from “placebo” laws. We find that the effect of shall-issue laws on crime is much less well-estimated than the Mustard and Lott (1997) and Lott (2000) results suggest. We also find, however, that the cross equation restrictions implied by the Lott-Mustard theory are supported. A boomlet has occurred in recent years in the use of quasi-natural experiments to answer important questions of public policy. The intuitive power of this approach, however, has sometimes diverted attention from the statistical assumptions that must be made, particularly regarding standard errors. Failing to take into account serial correlation and grouped data can dramatically reduce standard errors suggesting greater certainty in effects than is actually the case. We find that the placebo law technique (Bertrand, Duflo and Mullainathan 2002) is a useful addition to the econometrician’s toolkit.

THE FUGITIVE: EVIDENCE ON PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE LAW ENFORCEMENT FROM BAIL JUMPING

On the day of their trial, a substantial number of felony defendants fail to appear. Public police have the primary responsibility for pursuing and rearresting defendants who were released on their own recognizance or on cash or government bail. Defendants who made bail by borrowing from a bond dealer, however, must worry about an entirely different pursuer. When a defendant who has borrowed money skips trial, the bond dealer forfeits the bond unless the fugitive is soon returned. As a result, bond dealers have an incentive to monitor their charges and ensure that they do not skip. When a defendant does skip, bond dealers hire bounty hunters to return the defendants to custody. We compare the effectiveness of these two different systems by examining failure‐to‐appear rates, fugitive rates, and capture rates of felony defendants who fall under the various systems. We apply propensity score and matching techniques.

Would the Borda Count Have Avoided the Civil War

The election of 1860 was one of the most important and contentious elections in US history. It was also one of the most interesting. Four candidates from three different parties battled for the presidency and all four received a significant number of votes. We ask whether Lincolns victory was sound, or was it due to a fluke in the electoral system? Did a Lincoln win plausibly represent the will of the voters or would a different voting system have represented their preferences more accurately? Would the outcome have been the same had one or more of the candidates dropped out of the race? These and other questions are answered using new graphical techniques which let us assess voter preferences more accurately. Using these techniques, we are able to show, in a single figure, the outcome of every positional voting system, as well as all possible approval voting outcomes. By comparing the outcome under plurality rule to the outcomes which would have occurred under other voting systems, we conclude that Stephen Douglas, not Lincoln, was plausibly the candidate who best represented the preferences of the voters.

Race, Poverty, and American Tort Awards: Evidence From Three Data Sets

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. The average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black county poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise the average personal injury tort award by 3–10 percent. An increase in the Hispanic county poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise awards by as much as 7 percent, although this effect is less well estimated. Forum shopping for high‐poverty minority counties could raise awards by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Average awards decrease with increases in white (nonblack, non‐Hispanic) poverty rates in two of our data sets, making these findings even more surprising. Awards increase with black and Hispanic county poverty rates even after controlling for a wide variety of other potential causes.

President Perot or Fundamentals of Voting Theory Illustrated with the 1992 Election

Different voting systems can lead to different election outcomeseven when voter preferences are held constant. Using the 1992 election as anexample, it is shown how the outcome of every positional votesystem can be found. Similarly, every possible cumulative andapproval vote outcome is shown. Multiple vote systems, likeapproval and cumulative voting, have disturbing properties. Usingthe 1992 election as illustration, it is shown how a candidate whowins under every positional vote system, who wins every pairwisevote (i.e. is the Condorcet winner), and who has the most firstplace and least last place votes may nevertheless lose underapproval or cumulative voting. Similarly, it is shown how acandidate who loses under every positional system, who loses everypairwise vote (i.e. is the Condorcet loser), and who has the leastfirst place and most last place votes may nevertheless win underapproval or cumulative voting.

Data Watch: Tort-uring the Data

This article discusses data available for researchers interested in the U.S. civil justice system and illustrates the uses of the various datasets with some interesting findings. Our focus is on torts, defined as an injury to person or property that is not covered by contract and for which civil liability may be imposed. The most common tort is the result of an auto accident. We discuss data useful for analyzing trends, data that are useful for cross-sectional research and finally data covering only a specific type of civil litigation such as medical malpractice. We conclude by discussing the limitations of all civil litigation data.