William H. J. Hubbard

Explaining the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women

The last forty years have witnessed a remarkable boom in higher education around the world. Importantly, the boom in higher education has been concentrated among women, such that today in most higher-income countries, and many lower-income countries, more women than men attend and complete tertiary education. We present a model that explains the increase in higher education, particularly among women, in terms of a market for college graduates in which the supply of college graduates is function of the distribution of the costs and benefits of higher education across individuals. Examining evidence on these costs and benefits, we find no clear evidence that benefits are greater for women than men. Instead, it appears that differences in the total costs of college for women and men - primarily due to differences in the distributions of non-cognitive skills for women and men - explain the overtaking of men by women in higher education.

The Phantom Gender Difference in the College Wage Premium

A growing literature seeks to explain why so many more women than men now attend college. A commonly cited stylized fact is that the college wage premium is, and has been, higher for women than for men. After identifying and correcting a bias in estimates of college wage premiums, I find that there has been essentially no gender difference in the college wage premium for at least a decade. A similar pattern appears in quantile wage regressions and for advanced degree wage premiums.

Testing for Change in Procedural Standards, with Application to Bell Atlantic v. Twombly

Measuring legal change—i.e., change in the way that judges decide cases—presents a vexing problem. In response to a change in the behavior of courts, plaintiffs and defendants will change their patterns of filing and settling cases. Priest and Klein’s (1984) selection model predicts that no matter how favorable or unfavorable the legal standard is to plaintiffs, the rate at which plaintiffs prevail in litigation will not predictably change; thus, legal change cannot be measured with data on court outcomes. In this paper, I extend the selection model to develop a methodology for measuring legal change, even in the presence of selection effects. I apply this methodology to a recent, high profile Supreme Court case, Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly. My model generates novel predictions, which are confirmed in the data, and I find that Twombly caused no legal change, even after accounting for possible selection effects. ∗Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School, and Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago Department of Economics. I am grateful for comments from Amanda Agan, Douglas Baird, Gary Becker, Omri Ben-Shahar, Emily Buss, Joe Cecil, Lee Epstein, Jonathan Hall, Cheryl Hubbard, Ashley Keller, Bill Landes, Ethan Lieber, Anup Malani, Tom Miles, Emily Oster, Mark Phillips, Richard Posner, Luke Threinen, Andrew Zuppann, and participants at the University of Chicago Law School Work-InProgress Workshop. I thank Lee Epstein, Bill Landes, and Richard Posner for providing me with their dataset of published opinions on motions to dismiss. Dylan Benson, Tirsit Berhanu, Liz Chao, Helen Chen, Jessica Dueck, and Georgia Sampedro provided invaluable assistance in preparing this dataset for analysis.

Procedural Flexibility in Three Dimensions

Sometimes the rules let you change the rules. In civil procedure, many rules are famously rigid—for example, neither parties nor the judge can stipulate to subject matter jurisdiction—but closer inspection yields many ways that judges or parties (individually or by agreement) can change procedural defaults, such as the number of depositions, trial by judge or jury, or even (sometimes) jurisdiction. Whether or not the judge or parties have “flexibility” to change the rules of the game is an important, but understudied, aspect of procedure. This paper is the first to document the full spectrum of procedural flexibility—the varied and sometimes surprising range of ways in which judges and parties can modify procedure in their cases. We show that procedure flexibility spans a broad spectrum from rigid inflexibility, to contracts to modify procedure, to unilateral control over procedure, and beyond, to a frontier of innovations—buying and selling of procedures between parties in different cases, and markets or auctions for everything from depositions to jury trials. Some of these possibilities seem radical, but we also show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, current civil practice permits similarly radical flexing of procedure. As a normative matter, we argue that even radical forms of flexibility (like markets in procedure) cannot be ruled out based on familiar normative criteria such as facilitating democratic participation, efficient dispute resolution, norm creation, or distributive justice. To the contrary, such forms of procedural flexibility may offer unexpected avenues for addressing inequities of the current status quo.

Costly Signaling, Pleading, and Settlement

This paper develops a game-theoretic model that explores the use of costly signals in a litigation environment with private information held by the plaintiff. I compare the costly signaling model with the canonical models of settlement through screening (Bebchuk 1984) and settlement signaling (Reinganum and Wilde 1986), and show that the costly signaling model compares favorably to these models along several dimensions, suggesting that it merits further exploration as a tool for studying suit and settlement. Under plausible conditions, costly signaling (rather than other signaling or screening mechanisms) will emerge endogenously in litigation, and its results are more robust to changes in modeling assumptions. I apply the costly signaling model to study the effects of filing fees and heightened pleading standards, and find counterintuitive and policy-relevant results: steeply raising the costs of litigation through filing fees or heightened pleading standards may lower the total costs of litigation without reducing the number and size of settlements obtained by plaintiffs; but from a private welfare perspective, raising pleading standards may hurt plaintiffs even if their case outcomes are unaffected.

Quantum Economics, Newtonian Economics, and Law

Just as Newtonian mechanics breaks down when we look at the constituent pieces of our universe—subatomic particles—neoclassical economics breaks down when we look at the constituent pieces of our society—individual people. At the scale of subatomic particles, quantum mechanics provides new foundations for understanding the physical world; at the scale of individual decisionmaking, behavioral economics promises new foundations for understanding the social, economic, and legal worlds. As this Article explains, this analogy between Newtonian and quantum physics, on the one hand, and neoclassical and behavioral economics, on the other hand, has much to reveal about law and economics. With the help of numerous examples of key finding in behavioral law and economics, I take three principles from quantum mechanics (the uncertainty principle, the correspondence principle, and the quantum principle) and show how analogous principles in economics help illuminate the future trajectory of law and economics. I then seek to accelerate this trajectory by proposing an agenda for strengthening behavioral law and economics through a stronger grounding in theory, and specifically a “quantum” theory of decisionmaking. Along the way, the analysis leads me to challenge some common misconceptions about law and economics: behavioral and neoclassical approaches to law and economics are not rivals, but partners; simplistic and artificial assumptions about human behavior remain a problem in law and economics, but most acutely in behavioral law and economics; and the notion that neoclassical economics promotes a deregulatory agenda and behavioral economics promotes a pro-regulatory agenda is, as often as not, exactly backwards.

Yong Shik Lee, "Call for a New Analytical Model for Law and Development": A Comment

Abstract In his recent article, “Call for a New Analytical Model for Law and Development,” Yong-Shik Lee undertakes an ambitious pair of tasks: to redefine the field of law and development, and to provide a guiding framework for future work on law and development. In this short comment, I argue that, with some qualifications, Lee’s efforts promise to provide a healthy degree of coherence to an inevitably eclectic field.

Judicial Noncompliance with Mandatory Procedural Rules under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act

Section 21D(c)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act subjects courts to an unusually clear mandate: courts must make findings on whether attorneys complied with Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which sanctions frivolous or unsupported claims) in every case arising under the act. Yet we find that courts make these required findings less than 14 percent of the time. We also find that the required Rule 11 findings are not more likely in cases where parties seek sanctions under Rule 11 but are made overwhelmingly in court orders approving settlements—the circumstance in which sanctions are least likely. To explain these surprising results, we offer an account of judicial behavior that emphasizes judicial learning, judicial effort, and the crucial ways in which the incentives of the judge and of the attorneys may interact in complex cases.

Civil Settlement during Rape Prosecutions

A defendant in a criminal rape prosecution faces the prospect of a civil action brought by the complainant.2 Sometimes, the defendant will offer to settle the potential civil case with the complainant while the prosecution is still pending. Following settlement, the complainant may request that the charges be dropped or refuse to cooperate with the prosecution. A prosecution for a robbery or an assault still could proceed without the cooperation of the alleged victim, relying instead on other witnesses and physical evidence. But a rape prosecution is different. A rape prosecution almost always relies heavily on the complainants testimony. If the complainant is no longer interested in pursuing the case, even the most zealous prosecutor may have little choice but to drop the charges.3 Regardless of how the