Black Metropolis Research Consortium
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China’s Anticorruption Campaign and Entrepreneurship
No full textThis paper investigates the causal effect of corruption on entrepreneurship. We use staggered anticorruption investigations in China as exogenous shocks to conduct difference-in-differences estimation and find that the country’s anticorruption campaign has a sizeable positive effect on entrepreneurship, especially in urban areas, areas with high levels of trust, and areas with short verdict processes after investigation. We discuss four plausible mechanisms for the positive effect of the anticorruption campaign: reduced rent seeking, improved government quality, technology spillover from innovation, and the easing of financial constraints for non-state-owned enterprises. Our results are robust to a battery of tests based on different specifications and alternative measures. Overall, this study provides a timely evaluation of the importance of anticorruption efforts in a typical emerging market
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?
No full textThere is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly predicts whether countries have similar property regimes but does little to predict whether countries have similar antitrust regimes. Our results suggest that legal origin may be an important predictor of legal substance in well-established legal regimes but does little to explain substantive variation in more recent areas of law
Did the Independence of Judges Reduce Legal Development in England, 1600–1800?
No full textConventional wisdom confers iconic status on the clause of England’s Act of Settlement (1701) mandating secure tenure for judges. This paper uses new databases of judges’ biographies and citations to estimate how the move to secure tenure affected the number of citations to judges’ decisions, a measure of the quality of decisions. Several strategies facilitate identification of the effect of secure tenure. A court-year panel permits use of a difference-in-differences framework. Controls capture judges’ human capital and amount of litigation. Historical evidence, tests of sensitivity to omitted-variable bias, and instrumental variables estimates support the findings on the effects of tenure arrangements derived from ordinary least squares estimates. Secure tenure had a strong deleterious effect on associate judges’ decisions and a smaller positive effect on chief judges’ decisions. The effect of all judges having secure tenure is negative, large, and statistically significant. The act had an effect opposite of that universally assumed.
According to the plan of the convention, all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices during good behavior…. The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. (Hamilton [1788] , pp. 226–27)In one sense you could say that Judge [Roy] Bean was independent. He did whatever he liked. (O’Connor , p. 47
Intended and Unintended Effects of Banning Menthol Cigarettes
No full textBans on menthol cigarettes have been adopted throughout the European Union, proposed by the US Food and Drug Administration, and enacted by legislatures in Massachusetts and California. Yet there is very limited evidence on their effects using real-world policy variation. We study the intended and unintended effects of menthol cigarette bans in Canada, where seven provinces banned them prior to a nationwide ban in 2018. Difference-in-differences models using national survey data return no evidence that provincial menthol cigarette bans affected overall smoking rates for youths or adults. Although menthol cigarette smoking fell for both youths and adults, youths increased nonmenthol cigarette smoking, and adults shifted cigarette purchases to unregulated First Nations reserves. Our results demonstrate the importance of accounting for substitution and evasion responses in the design of stricter tobacco regulations
The Limits of International Law Fifteen Years Later
Get PDFThe Limits of International Law received a great deal of criticism when it was published in 2005 but it has aged well. The skeptical, social-scientific methodology that it recommended has become a normal mode of international law scholarship. And the dominant idealistic view of international law that the book criticized is today in shambles, unable to explain the turmoil in international politics. This essay reflects on the book’s reception and corrects common misperceptions of its arguments
