Max M. Schanzenbach

Racial and Sex Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District-Level Judicial Demographics

This paper estimates the effect of judicial characteristics (political affiliation, race, and sex) on federal criminal sentencing using variation in judicial characteristics at the district level. The results suggest that judges’ race and sex have little influence on prison sentences in general but do affect racial and sex disparities. For serious offenses, increasing the proportion of female judges in a district decreases the sex disparity. I interpret this as evidence of a paternalistic bias among male judges that favors female offenders. The racial composition of the bench has mixed effects that are open to different interpretations. Finally, there is little evidence that the political composition of the district affects sentencing disparities.

The Impact of Tort Reform on Private Health Insurance Coverage

This study evaluates the impact of tort reform on private health insurance coverage using the Current Population Survey’s March Demographic Files. Proponents of tort reform argue that reform will reduce medical malpractice insurance costs, damage awards, and costs associated with defensive medicine. If proponents are correct, these cost reductions should increase health insurance coverage. On the other hand, if the prior tort law was functioning well, reform may increase medical costs by reducing doctors’ care-taking or increasing of the use of aggressive treatments. In this case, tort reform could actually decrease insurance coverage by raising healthcare costs. We evaluate the effect of eight common tort reforms on private health insurance coverage between 1981 and 2007. We find that damage caps, collateral source reform, and joint and several liability reform increased health insurance coverage for the most price-sensitive groups (the single-young and the self-employed) between one-half and one percentage point each. Accordingly, we conclude that tort reform may increase insurance coverage rates for price-sensitive groups, but its overall effect on coverage will be small.

Do Standards of Review Matter? The Case of Federal Criminal Sentencing

We study whether changes to standards of review affect district court sentencing decisions under the U.S. sentencing guidelines. Departures from the guidelines by district judges have at times been reviewed strictly or deferentially. If review standards are constraining, then differences among judges should be larger when review is deferential. We find that Democratic appointees are more lenient than Republican appointees under deferential review, but this difference significantly narrows when review is strict. We conclude that district judges are meaningfully constrained by the prospect of appellate reversal. By contrast, judges appointed before the adoption of the guidelines are more likely to depart and issue shorter sentences, but their decisions are not significantly affected by the standard of review. We suggest that the constraining effect of appellate review varies with a judge’s respect for the underlying legal regime.

The impact of tort reform on intensity of treatment: Evidence from heart patients☆

This paper analyzes the effect of non-economic damage caps on the treatment intensity of heart attack victims. We focus on whether a patient receives a major intervention in the form of either a coronary artery by-pass or angioplasty. We find strong evidence that treatment intensity declines after a cap on non-economic damages. The probability of receiving a major intervention in the form of either an angioplasty or bypass declines by 1.25-2 percentage points after non-economic damage caps are enacted, and this effect is larger a year or two after reform. However, we also find clear evidence of substitution between major interventions. When doctors have discretion to perform a by-pass and patients have insurance coverage, caps on non-economic damages increase the probability that a by-pass is performed. The effect of non-economic damage caps on costs is not always statistically significant, but in models with state-specific trends, total costs decline by as much as four percent. We conclude that tort reform reduces treatment intensity overall, even though it changes the mix of treatments. Using the Center for Disease Controls Vital Statistics data, we find that tort reform is not associated with an increase in mortality from coronary heart disease; if anything, mortality declines.

Jurisdictional Competition for Trust Funds: An Empirical Analysis of Perpetuities and Taxes

This Article presents the first empirical study of the domestic jurisdictional competition for trust funds. To allow donors to exploit a loophole in the federal estate tax, since 1986 a host of states have abolished the Rule Against Perpetuities as applied to interests in trust. To allow individuals to shield assets from creditors, since 1997 a handful of states have validated self-settled asset protection trusts. Based on reports to federal banking authorities, we find that, on average, through 2003 a states abolition of the Rule increased its reported trust assets by

The Prudent Investor Rule and Market Risk: An Empirical Analysis

6 billion (a 20% increase) and increased its average trust account size by

Explaining the Public-Sector Pay Gap: The Role of Skill and College Major

200,000. By contrast, our assessment of validating self-settled asset protection trusts yielded indeterminate results. Our perpetuities findings imply that roughly

Good Cop, Bad Cop: An Analysis of Chicago Civilian Allegations of Police Misconduct

100 billion in trust funds have moved to take advantage of the abolition of the Rule. Interestingly, states that levied an income tax on trust funds attracted from out of state experienced no observable increase in trust business after abolishing the Rule. Because this finding implies that abolishing the Rule does not directly increase a states tax revenue, it bears on the study of jurisdictional competition. In spite of the lack of direct tax revenue from attracting trust business, the jurisdictional competition for trust funds is patently real and intense. Our findings also speak to unresolved issues of policy concerning state property law and federal tax law.

The Effect of Prison Sentence Length on Recidivism: Evidence from Random Judicial Assignment

The prudent investor rule, enacted in every state over the last 30 years, is the centerpiece of trust investment law. Repudiating the prior law’s emphasis on avoiding risk, the rule reorients trust investment toward risk management in accordance with modern portfolio theory. The rule directs a trustee to implement an overall investment strategy having risk and return objectives reasonably suited to the trust. Using data from reports of bank trust holdings and fiduciary income tax returns, we examine asset allocation and management of market risk before and after the reform. First, we find that the reform increased stockholdings, but not among banks with average trust account sizes below the 25th percentile. This result is consistent with sensitivity in asset allocation to trust risk tolerance. Second, we present evidence consistent with increased portfolio rebalancing after the reform. We conclude that the move toward additional stockholdings was correlated with trust risk tolerance, and that the increased market risk exposure from additional stockholdings was more actively managed.

The State and Local Pay Penalty: The Effect of Skill and College Major

This paper reassesses the public-sector pay gap using AFQT score and college major as measures of skill. Among the college educated, there is strong evidence that those with lower skills enter the public sector. In contrast to the private sector, for college-educated public-sector workers, AFQT score is not correlated with pay, and college major is only weakly predictive of pay. Furthermore, simple controls for college major explain most of the public-private-sector pay gap. I conclude that the public-sector pay gap is much smaller than previously estimated and pay rigidities cause significant skill-based selection between the sectors.