First Publication Forthcoming

My article with Eric Helland, titled Legal Outcomes and Home Court Advantage: Evidence from the SEC’s Shift to Administrative Courts, will be published in the Journal of Law and Economics in November of 2023.

I previously presented this paper at the Conference of Empirical Legal Studies in March of 2022 at the (online version of) University of Toronto.

Abstract: Administrative Law Judges’ (ALJs’) relative lack of formal independence has engendered worries that ALJs give agencies a “home-court’’ advantage. We examine the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which allowed the SEC to move cases into its administrative court. The problem Dodd-Frank as a policy experiment is that the SEC retains the discretion to bring cases in federal court, so it is impossible to identify which cases the policy treats. We propose a difference-in-difference design, using natural language processing (NLP) methods to create our control and treatment groups. We construct the propensity scores using random forest methods. After binning cases into likely and not likely affected by the Dodd-Frank expansion of administrative courts, the difference-in-differences estimation indicates the expansion made defendants 30 percentage points more likely to settle and 36 percentage points more likely to receive a non-monetary penalty. We also find a 24-percentage point reduction in the likelihood of a monetary penalty.