Journal of Empirical Legal Studies最新文献

Using the complete record of all federal civil docket sheets for cases filed in a two-year period, recently made available by the SCALES-OKN project, we find that most cases that enter the federal system—about 60%–68%—are resolved without any dispositive motion filed for consideration by a neutral arbiter (judge or magistrate) or a trial. Only 30%–40% include a filing of a dispositive motion (such as a motion to dismiss or motion for summary judgment) or, in the rare case, trial. An additional 8% exit the system, mostly by remand or transfer. The majority of cases resolved at the Complaint or Answer stage end quickly (often within 90 days) and with few docket entries (often fewer than 12). While there is heterogeneity in adjudication rates across case types, the pattern of non-adjudication is widespread, and aggregate results are not driven by outliers. We find considerable heterogeneity in the level of non-adjudication among individual judges, underscoring the importance of judicial discretion to case processing. Further study of the consequences of the lack of dispositive motion practice in most federal cases for the functioning of the legal system and for the larger society is warranted.

Proxy advisor recommendations play a central role in research on shareholder voting and corporate governance, yet they have become largely unavailable to academics. I develop a method to impute benchmark recommendations from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis using publicly available institutional voting data and estimated investor “follow rates”—the investor's likelihood of voting in line with each advisor. The method applies Bayes' theorem to infer recommendations from observed votes and iteratively updates both follow rates and imputations over successive rounds. To improve performance on contested proposals and avoid systematic bias, I estimate follow rates that vary by context—such as whether management and the other advisor agree with the recommendation. Validation against actual recommendations shows high accuracy: 96.4% of ISS recommendations imputed with 99.6% accuracy and 90.8% of Glass Lewis recommendations with 99.0% accuracy. Coverage improves substantially over prior approaches, especially for hard-to-classify proposals. I provide the full dataset of imputed recommendations as an Online Appendix for academic use.

Guidance documents are a main pillar of the modern administrative state. While federal agencies issue thousands of rules every year through notice-and-comment rulemaking, they issue even more guidance documents in various forms. There is, however, an ongoing and fierce dispute over agencies' ability to create binding obligations through guidance without the notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures stipulated by the Administrative Procedure Act. The binding norm doctrine purports to prevent agencies from creating binding obligations through guidance, and often focuses on documents' choice of wording. But to what extent do guidance documents use binding language, and how do courts understand them? Despite the widespread interest in these questions, however, there has been a surprising lack of empirical studies tackling them. This article begins to bridge this gap and presents an analysis based on a novel dataset compiled from an online database of agency guidance, which encompasses nearly 70,000 documents issued by three key federal agencies from 1970 to 2022. Using computational text analysis, it investigates the language of guidance documents to assess their potential bindingness. It identifies specific linguistic cues that courts have used to interpret documents as binding or non-binding and applies these criteria across the dataset. The findings indicate a significant rise in the quantity and the assertiveness of language in guidance documents over the decades and show their near parity with legislative rules in terms of their binding effect, suggesting that guidance has indeed become a main bulwark of administrative policymaking. Moreover, the analysis explores judicial reviews of guidance documents, finding no substantial differences between documents that were set aside as too binding and others that were upheld, suggesting that the application of the binding norm doctrine fails to create a systematic and consistent framework for administrative agencies and regulated entities. In response to these findings, the article proposes a shift from the current focus on the close textual reading of documents to a procedural label test, which assesses only whether a rule has undergone the required procedural steps. This approach aims to simplify the legal assessment of guidance documents and provide a more stable foundation for administrative action.

Government venture capital funds (GVCs) are a global phenomenon. GVCs are central players in China's VC market, now the second largest globally. While existing literature often depicts China's GVCs as a successful public effort to promote entrepreneurship, this paper presents an alternative view. It explores the effect of city-level GVC programs on entrepreneurship, as proxied by the formation of new businesses. Using a hand-collected 20-year dataset covering GVC program adoption, early-stage investments, and new firm formation in 280 prefectural cities and employing difference-in-differences and weighted stacked event study methods, I find that Chinese GVCs are associated with a decrease in overall new firm formation. Interview-based evidence and a triple-differences analysis by industrial sector suggest that this result is driven by stringent investment restrictions imposed by GVC programs, which absorb private sector capital into GVC funds targeting specific industries, thereby discouraging new firm formation in non-policy-supported sectors. These findings offer a cautionary note to global policymakers regarding the complexities of public finance strategies aimed at boosting entrepreneurship.

The market value of distinctive trademarks is a fundamental assumption of both trademark law and marketing theory. However, there is little empirical evidence underlying this assumption. We examine the relationship between brand dissimilarity and market prices in the context of the Bordeaux wine market. Using a unique dataset covering thousands of wines and their associated prices and professional ratings, we find that brand distinctiveness is related to higher wine prices. We further show that this relationship persists across the wine quality spectrum, with both lower quality and higher quality wines benefiting from dissimilar marks. Finally, we show that while there is a dissimilarity price premium for lower quality wines, producers who invest in higher quality wines are rewarded with an even greater premium for dissimilar names in absolute dollar terms.

Legal scholars have long debated whether law, through its expressive power, can influence prevailing social norms. Empirical studies inspired by this debate have focused on establishing the existence of an expressive power. However, this dichotomous perspective overlooks the nuances of the theoretical discourse regarding the conditions under which law, independent of any enforcement, can wield greater or lesser impact on social norms. This article employs a regression discontinuity design to examine the expressive power of the law in shaping social norms and measure its sensitivity to contextual factors. Using a preregistered incentivized experimental survey (N = 2913), we demonstrate that: (1) law, qua law, can indeed influence perceived social norms; and (2) this influence of the law is moderated by the normative clarity of the scenario. The law has the greatest impact on perceived norms in ambiguous situations; when additional normatively relevant information is provided, the expressive power of the law diminishes.

When conflicts between religious wedding vendors and same-sex couples arise, courts and legislatures face a dilemma. Existing empirical work such as audit studies and field experiments shows that religious exemptions may lead to higher refusal rates for same-sex couples seeking wedding services. But judges are hesitant to use this empirical evidence to address these conflicts. Doing so appears to balance two harms: the same-sex couple's harm from being refused service against a religious wedding vendor's harm from being denied a religious accommodation. As a result, judges and lawmakers elude serious engagement with the empirical realities of these conflicts and make diverging assumptions about the underlying effects of religious exemptions on market access. This article proposes a novel method for courts and legislatures to address these conflicts with market-based evidence. This approach involves two parts: a catchment area analysis and a non-deceptive survey. The catchment area analysis relies on data from more than 29 million cell phone users to model consumer behavior. The distance customers will travel to a baker or florist proxies for their willingness to pay and thus suggests substitutability with alternative vendors. The catchment analysis here looks at five states (Arkansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Utah) with similarly rural population geographies but different mixes of religious freedom and nondiscrimination legal requirements. With this evidence of public accommodation markets, the second part of the method uses a non-deceptive survey to determine which bakers and florists have religious objections. Across the five states, 206 (85%) bakers and 660 (84%) florists agreed to take the survey which included two questions: (1) whether they made cakes or arranged flowers for weddings and (2) whether they would have any restrictions doing those things for a same-sex wedding due to a religious objection. After filtering out those who did not provide wedding services, six out of 149 bakeries (4%) and 45 out of 615 florists (7%) voiced objections with suggestive evidence that religious exemptions contributed to higher refusal rates in RFRA regimes (7%–18% for florists) compared to non-RFRA (3% for florists). Combined with the catchment area evidence, this analysis also shows which refusals would leave same-sex couples without a readily available alternative. On average, religious exemptions would produce material harm for 2% of consumers, but legal regimes that allow more localized lawmaking on these issues tend to see 1–2 percentage points less material harm. In sum, this approach shows how judges and lawmakers can use market-based evidence of material harm and thereby avoid balancing dignitary interests. Moreover, this study further indicates government—especially local governments—can accommodate religious objectors while administering public accommodation protections for same-sex couples and countering stigma.

Roughly 40% of bankrupt consumers file under Chapter 13. However, scholars have consistently criticized the chapter, sometimes calling for its elimination. Much of this criticism is motivated by the longstanding statistic that only one-third of Chapter 13 debtors obtain a discharge. Despite its prominence, much research underpinning this statistic is decades old and relies on small samples from a few bankruptcy courts. This paper reexamines the Chapter 13 discharge rate using the universe of recently filed bankruptcy cases. We first clarify that there are multiple plausible definitions of the “discharge rate.” Most prior literature measures the share of Chapter 13 cases that obtain a discharge in Chapter 13, and sometimes the discharge measure is expanded to include conversions to Chapter 7. By matching cases based on debtor names, we can observe whether a debtor receives a discharge in a subsequent case. Using this matching procedure, we introduce a new definition—the share of debtors who receive a discharge within 6 years of their Chapter 13 filing. We find that, for cases filed between 2008 and 2014, the discharge rate exceeds the oft-cited one-third statistic. Plausible national discharge rates vary from 40% (percent of Chapter 13 cases that obtain a discharge in Chapter 13) to 66% (percent of attorney-represented, first-time Chapter 13 debtors who obtain a discharge within 6 years). We also examine geographic patterns in discharge rates across districts and quantify the role of attorney representation, conversion rates, and repeat filing rates in explaining cross-district variation.