Deep IV in Law: Appellate Decisions and Texts Impact Sentencing in Trial Courts

by Zhe Huang, Xinyue Zhang, Ruofan Wang, Daniel L. Chen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009296397
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/25/2022
Series:	Elements in Law, Economics and Politics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

Table of 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.