Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles
By Ozkan Eren, Naci H. Mocan. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2018
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a US state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpected losses increase sentence lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex ante have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black defendants. The impact of upset losses on sentence lengths is larger for defendants if their cases are handled by judges who received their bachelor's degrees from the university with which the football team is affiliated. Different falsification tests and a number of auxiliary analyses demonstrate the robustness of the findings. These results provide evidence for the impact of emotions in one domain on decisions in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly educated group of individuals (judges) who make decisions after deliberation that involve high stakes (sentence lengths). They also point to the existence of a subtle and previously unnoticed capricious application of sentencing. (JEL D83, I23, J13, J15, K42, L83, Z21)
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f7bac4548a84f4209332ecd6fc9fc8342060f9a
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Citations in the corpus
- Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football (2020, unknown): “…that the impact of sporting achievements could work through a strictly individual positive predisposition or perception of increased well-being ( as in Edmans, García, and Norli 2007 or Eren and Mocan 2018 , as opposed to ( the perception of a shared collective experience between fellow citizens.”
- Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases (2019, background): “Eren and Mocan (2018) find that Louisiana juvenile court judges hand down sentences that are 6.4% longer following an unexpected loss by the Louisiana State University (LSU) NCAA football team, with the effects largest for judges who based closest to the home of LSU.”