In recent years, much attention has been directed at the ongoing increase in body weight, and what might be done about it. We use data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the period 1982-1996 to estimate models relating measures of body weight (BMI, a dummy indicating that a...

Event studies have become increasingly important in securities fraud litigation, and the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., heightened their importance by holding that the results of event studies could be used to obtain or rebut the presumption of...

Empirical work has grown in importance in law and economics. This growth coincides with improvements in research designs in empirical microeconomics more generally. In this essay, we provide a stylized discussion of some trends over the last two or three decades, linking the credibility...

In this chapter I discuss the history and basic incentive effects of two key U.S. cash assistance programs aimed at families with children. Starting roughly in the 1980s, critics of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program argued that the program -- designed largely to cut...

In the social sciences, “data mining” sometimes refers pejoratively to the repetitive use of classical statistical methods to find “evidence” that results from only random variation. Various aspects of evidence and civil-procedure law disincentivize data mining by expert witnesses in...

In this paper I derive several straightforward restrictions imposed by the Becker model of discrimination in the highway search and pre-trial release contexts. I explain how these restrictions may be tested using real-world data at the decision level (e.g., whether to search or whether to...

Single-firm event studies play an important role in both scholarship and litigation despite the general invalidity of standard inference. We use a broad cross-section of 2000-2007 CRSP data and find that the standard approach performs poorly in terms of both Type I and Type II error rates. We...