Adverse Consequences of Tort and Statutory Law 公开

Edwards, Griffin Sims (2011)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/ng451j06v?locale=zh
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Abstract

The effect of a law, whether it be through legislatures or courts, is often difficult
to identify given unintended consequences that arise. One example is the seminal ruling
of Tarasoff v. Regents that enacted a duty that required mental health providers to warn
potential victims of any real threat to life made by a patient. Using a fixed effects model
and exploiting the variation in the timing and style of duty to warn laws across states, I
find that mandatory duty to warn laws cause an increase in homicides of 5%. These
results are robust to model specifications, falsification tests, and help to clarify the true
effect of state duty to warn laws.
Another is the ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Previous
research has found both theoretically and empirically that Chevron favors agencies and
their interpretation of statutes, but the magnitude of Chevron's impact remains unclear
due to possible selection issues biasing the post- Chevron world. I account for the
possibility that incentives change both to the challenger of an agency and the agency
itself post- Chevron by estimating a break in the trend of agency deference on the date
Chevron was decided. This allows me to exploit the exogenous cases that were pending
when Chevron was decided while still employing the full sample of rulings. Both
parametric and nonparametric specifications of the trend in agency deference suggest that
Chevron increased agency deference by about 20 percentage points meaning that agency
will win a challenge around 80% of the time.
The third law on which I focus deals with an organized criminal firm's ability to
extract monopoly rents from victim firms. Using a U.S. state panel and data on federal
racketeering cases charged, I find that all else equal, a 0.1 percentage point increase in the
amount of non-English speakers in a state will increase the expected number of
racketeering cases per state per year by 0.8. This is weakly supported by the fact that
states with fewer small businesses, and thus a higher probability of earning monopoly
rents, experience less racketeering activity.

Table of Contents





Table of Contents

1
Doing Their Duty: An empirical analysis of the unintended effect of
1
Tarasoff v Regents on homicidal activity
2
A Selection-Corrected Estimate of Chevron's Impact on Agency Deference
50
3
The Power of the Racketeer: An Empirical Approach
83







Tables and Figures

1
Summary of State Duty to Warn Laws
34
2
Summary Statistics
36
3
FE estimation of the effect of state duty to warn laws on the log of state
40
NCHS homicide rates
4
FE estimation of the effect of state duty to warn laws on the log of state non-
41
stranger UCR-SHR homicide rates
5
FE estimation of the heterogeneous effect of state duty to warn laws on the
42
log of state NCHS homicide rates
6
FE estimation of the effect of state duty to warn laws on the log of state
44
NCHS homicide rates with lower court timing
7
FE estimation of the effect of state duty to warn laws on the log of state non-
45
stranger UCR-SHR homicide rates with lower court timing
8
FE estimation of the effect of state duty to warn laws on the log of UCR
46
manslaughter rates
9
The effect of state duty to warn laws on the log of UCR manslaughter rates
47
with lower court timing
10 Current State Duty to Warn Laws Figure
48
11 Duty to Warn Laws Year of First Enactment Figure
49
12 Chevron Summary Statistics
69
13 Replication of Richards et al. (2006) measures of the Chevron's Effect on
71
Judicial Voting for Agency Deference
14 Parametric Estimates of Chevron's Effect on Judicial Voting for Agency
73
Deference
15 Non-Parametric Estimates of Chevron's Effect on Agency Deference Over a
74
Range of Bandwidths
16 Non-Parametric Estimates of Chevron's Effect on Placebo Outcomes
75
17 Parametric Specification of Chevron's Effect on Agency Deference Graph
77
Nonparametric Specification of Chevron's Effect on Agency Deference
18
78
Graph
19 The Effect of Bandwidth Selection Graph
79
20 Non Parametric Jumps Among Control Variables Graphs
80

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