F. Andrew Hanssen

Is There a Politically Optimal Level of Judicial Independence

Independent courts render current policy more durable (by raising the cost of future policy changes) but may also engage in policy-making of their own. This paper asks: Is there an optimal level of judicial independence from the perspective of incumbent officials in the other branches? To answer that question, the paper develops a model of strategic institutional choice, and tests it on the judicial institutions of the American states. Consistent with the models predictions, the most independenceenhancing institutions are found where political competition between rival parties is tightest and differences between party platforms are largest.

The Effect of Judicial Institutions on Uncertainty and the Rate of Litigation: The Election Versus Appointment of State Judges

This article compares litigation in appointed and elected state courts. Scholars have concluded that appointed judges are more independent than elected judges. Models of the litigation process suggest that litigation rates will be higher where uncertainty over court decisions is greater. If the institutions that promote judicial independence increase uncertainty, one should therefore find more litigation where judges are appointed and, if instead they decrease uncertainty, more litigation where judges are elected. Examining three samples of state court litigation, this analysis finds, on balance, more litigation where judges are appointed, consistent with the hypothesis that judicial independence has a net positive effect on decision uncertainty.

The Origins of Democracy: A Model with Application to Ancient Greece*

Abstract This paper seeks to provide an improved understanding of the origins of democracy. It begins by developing a theoretical model to demonstrate how exogenous economic conditions can influence the incentives to establish democratic institutions. The model predicts that democratic institutions will expand where they mitigate important time‐inconsistency problems and, therefore, encourage investment. Exogenous conditions determine the magnitude of those time‐inconsistency problems and, hence, the likelihood of democracy. A comparison of ancient Greek city‐states suggests that the conditions under which democracy first emerged support the model. Other potential applications are discussed.

The Block Booking of Films Reexamined

Block booking, banned by the U.S. Supreme Court, involves selling motion pictures as a package. The most generally accepted explanation for the practice is that it prevented exhibitors from “oversearching”—from rejecting films revealed ex post to be of below‐average value from an ex ante average‐valued package. This article examines the way in which block booking developed, the nature of the optimization problem, and the specifics of block‐booking contracts and finds little to support that hypothesis. Block booking emerged at a time when there was no oversearching problem, it was applied much more flexibly than a primary concern with oversearching would suggest, and exhibitors failed to make use of contractually permitted opportunities to behave in ways block booking was posited necessary to avoid. This article proposes instead that block booking was primarily intended to cheaply provide films in quantity, a claim made by movie producers of the time.

“Rulers ruled by women”: an economic analysis of the rise and fall of women’s rights in ancient Sparta

Until modern times, most women possessed relatively few formal rights. The women of ancient Sparta were a striking exception. Although they could not vote, Spartan women reportedly owned 40 percent of Sparta’s agricultural land, and enjoyed other rights that were equally extraordinary. We offer a simple economic explanation for the Spartan anomaly. The defining moment for Sparta was its conquest of a neighboring land and people, which fundamentally changed the marginal products of Spartan men’s and Spartan women’s labor. To exploit the potential gains from a reallocation of labor—specifically, to provide the appropriate incentives and the proper human capital formation—men granted women property (and other) rights. Consistent with our explanation for the rise of women’s rights, when Sparta lost the conquered land several centuries later, the rights for women disappeared. Two conclusions emerge that may help explain why women’s rights have been so rare for most of history. First, in contrast to the historical norm, the optimal (from the men’s perspective) division of labor among Spartans involved women in work that was not easily monitored by men. Second, the rights held by Spartan women may have been part of an unstable equilibrium, which contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Vertical Integration During the Hollywood Studio Era

The Hollywood studio system—production, distribution, and exhibition vertically integrated—flourished until 1948, when the famous Paramount decision forced the divestiture of theater chains and the abandonment of a number of vertical practices. Although many of the banned practices have since been posited to have increased efficiency, evidence of an efficiency-enhancing rationale for theater ownership has not been presented. This paper explores the hypothesis that theater chain ownership promoted efficient ex post adjustment in the length of film runs—specifically, abbreviation of unexpectedly unpopular films. Extracontractual run-length adjustments are desirable because demand for a film is not revealed until the film is actually exhibited. The paper employs a unique data set of cinema booking sheets. It finds that run lengths for releases by vertically integrated film producers were significantly—economically and statistically—more likely to be altered ex post. The paper documents and discusses additional practices intended to promote flexibility.

On the Benefits and Costs of Legal Expertise: Adjudication in Ancient Athens

Legal expertise permits detailed laws to be written and enforced, but individuals with expertise may employ their special knowledge to skew decisions in privately beneficial directions. We illustrate this tradeoff in a simple model, which we use to guide our analysis of the legal system in ancient Athens. Rather than accepting the costs of expertise in return for the benefits, as do most modern societies, the Athenians designed a legal system that banned professional legal experts. And this was not because Athenian society was simple: The Athenians employed sophisticated contingent contracts and litigated frequently (to the point that the law courts featured prominently in several famous comedies). Furthermore, the Athenians recognized that forgoing expertise was costly, and where the cost was particularly high, designed institutions that made use of expertise already existing in society, employed knowledgeable individuals who were unable to engage in significant rent-seeking, or increased the private returns to collecting publicly beneficial information. Although the Athenian legal system differs in many ways from modern legal systems, it nonetheless functioned very effectively. Investigation of the Athenian system highlights how important it is for institutional designers to consider legal institutions as a bundle, whose pieces must complement one another.

How Tyranny Paved the Way to Democracy: The Democratic Transition in Ancient Greece

Considerable scholarly work has examined the transition to democracy. In this paper, we investigate a path to democracy that is very different from that typically described. During the Archaic period (800–500 BCE), many Greek poleis (city-states) replaced aristocracies with a more narrow governing institution—an autocrat known as the tyrant. Yet as classical scholars have noted, many of the poleis where tyrants reigned in the Archaic period became among the broadest democracies in the subsequent Classical period (500–323 BCE). We analyze a data set of ancient Greek political regime types and review the history of the best-known Archaic period tyrants in order to explore why a transitory narrowing of power—Greek tyranny was a transitory institution—can set the stage for democratization. We briefly consider other historical and modern examples. Our paper shows why an understanding of progress toward democracy requires recognizing the potential importance of nonmonotonic transition paths.

A Test of the Racial Contact Hypothesis from a Natural Experiment: Baseball's All-Star Voting as a Case

Objective. The contact hypothesis is difficult to test because of selectivity bias: the direction of causation between contact and attitudes cannot be definitively determined. Selectivity bias can be avoided given a sample for which, for reasons unrelated to group member attitudes, whites divide into groups that differ systematically in the amount of contact they have with blacks. This paper uses a natural experiment that provides such a test: All-Star voting by baseball players versus fans. The average white player has more substantial and persistent contact with African Americans (as teammates) than does the average white fan, and the contact hypothesis would thus predict that players will discriminate less than fans, all else equal. Methods. Logistic, ordinary-least-squares (OLS), and tobit regressions are used to analyze the effect of candidate race on votes received, controlling for other factors. Results. No evidence is found of a differential in discrimination related to the amount of contact, although discrimination by both groups is found to decline between 1970 and 1980. Conclusion. The contact hypothesis is not supported; exogenous variations in the amount of interracial contact are not associated with difference in levels of discrimination.

Who Integrated Major League Baseball Faster Winning Teams or Losing Teams

In this article, the authors investigate the process of racial integration in Major League Baseball, critiquing the empirical approach used by Goff, McCormick, and Tollison (GMT; 2002). GMT claim to find evidence suggesting that winners integrated fastest. This study shows that when their empirical model is properly specified, the results do not support that conclusion. Several alternative tests are employed and the evidence is inconclusive—if anything, there is some weak support for the hypothesis that losers integrate faster.