Full Citation
Title: Adverse Consequences of Tort and Statutory Law
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2011
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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 rulingof 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 thatChevron 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.
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Authors: Edwards, Griffin
Institution: Emory University
Department: Economics
Advisor: Paul H. Rubin
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Publisher Location: Atlanta, GA
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Crime and Deviance
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