We examine whether concerns about lenders’ discrimination based on community racial characteristics can be empirically substantiated in the context of neighborhoods on and near American Indian reservations. Drawing on a large-scale dataset consisting of individual-level credit bureau records,...

We use machine-learning methods to study the features and origins of the Baconian program, a cultural and methodological paradigm viewed as providing the intellectual roots for modern economic growth. After building a machine-readable corpus of Bacon's works, we estimate a structural topic...

Court delays are a frequent concern, yet what explains court case duration remains incompletely understood. We study the time to court case resolution by drawing on a detailed case-level dataset of civil suits filed at a major Belgian court. We utilize the competing risks regression framework to...

We develop and empirically test a theory concerning individual beliefs about whether immigrants should culturally assimilate into the host society or preserve their own cultural norms. We argue that when national identity is a source of intrinsic utility, the longevity of national identity...

The history of England’s institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England’s institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two...

This is the second of two papers that generate and analyze quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and associated legal ideas before the Industrial Revolution. In the first paper, we estimated a 100-topic structural topic model, named the topics, and showed how to interpret...

We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed...

Insolvency systems play a crucial role in protection of creditor rights, yet micro-level empirical evidence on the functioning of insolvency regimes worldwide is sparse. We investigate whether creditors’ recovery of outstanding claims, a measure of ex-post efficiency of an insolvency regime,...

Since giving to religious organizations constitutes a substantial portion of total charitable giving, an understanding of the determinants of religious giving is a vital policy concern. Drawing on a novel congregation-level panel dataset, we examine whether religious giving is driven by...