Empirical Essays on the Economics of Burdens of Proof

Abstract

Chapter 1 examines the effects of state-level workers’ compensation reforms on workers’ access to compensation benefits. In nearly all liability settings the probability that an accident victim will receive payments and the amount of those payments are strongly influenced by laws or rules related to burdens of proof, legal procedure, access to medical treatment, and other nonquantitative factors. Yet, their impact is often difficult to measure empirically because it is difficult to measure the true liability and size of damages because those are also at issue in the proceedings. We study the impact of such nonquantitative laws on average accident payments per covered worker under workers’ compensation, where fault is not at issue and damage payments are set by statute. The results show that states experienced sizeable drops in cash and medical payments per covered worker of 20 and 16 percent, respectively, after they adopted burden of proof laws. A decomposition of national means between 1997 and 2016 shows that about 11 percent of the decline in the national average of benefits per covered worker might be attributed to the patterns of adoption of these laws. The analysis also shows that average statutory expected benefits rose during this period and thus served to counteract the decline in benefits per covered worker. Chapter 2 investigates the causal effects of restricting prosecutorial discretion on racial and gender disparities. In North Carolina, sentence enhancements may be imposed if prosecutors meet the legally required burden of showing the existence of aggravating factors. Blakely v.Washington 542 U.S. 296 (2004) imposed a significant constraint on state prosecutors’ discretion by raising their burdens of proof in successfully seeking sentence enhancements from “preponderance of evidence” to “beyond a reasonable doubt.” First, we use a regression discontinuity design to exploit the timing of the Blakely decision and find that Blakely decreases the defendants’ likelihood of receiving sentence enhancements by 66%. Second, we find striking evidence that restricting prosecutorial discretion disproportionately benefits male defendants and eliminates the entire unexplained pre-Blakely gender gap of men being 28% more likely to receive sentence enhancements than women. Examining subgroups of defendants with the same charging offenses, we find that Blakely disproportionately reduces the likelihood of receiving sentence enhancements among men charged with assault and women charged with forgery. This sharp comparison suggests that prosecutors tend to associate defendants’ gender with different types of aggravating factors and pursue sentence enhancements under weak evidence. In contrast, we find no evidence suggesting a racial gap of Black or Hispanic defendants being more likely to receive sentence enhancements than non-Black and non-Hispanic counterparts both pre and post Blakely. This finding provides no evidence suggesting prosecutors’ racial discrimination against Black or Hispanic defendants in pursuing sentence enhancements. Chapter 3 examines, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of the Court’s enforcement of the element rule. The element rule, proposed by Stephanos Bibas, means that facts increasing defendants’ statutory maximum sentences should be proved to juries beyond a reasonable doubt. We know very little about how the element rule affects criminal prosecution. This chapter tries to fill this important gap. First, I proposed a conceptual framework on how the element rule affects the prosecutors’ behavior. The model predicts a “direct effect” which makes prosecutors less likely to pursue sentence enhancements because complying with the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard increases the costs and decreases the expected benefits of pursuing enhancements. Enforcing the element rule may also generate spillover effects because prosecutors may compensate the loss of opportunities to punish defendants with sentence enhancements by changing other prosecution decisions. Secondly, I empirically estimated the direct and spillover effects by using large administrative criminal case records from North Carolina. I proxied the Court’s enforcement of the element rule using the Supreme Court’s decision, Blakely v. Washington. Through a regression discontinuity framework, I found strong evidence of the direct effects that Blakely reduced defendants’ likelihood of receiving sentence enhancements by 66%. On the other hand, I also found abundant evidence on the spillover effects of enforcing the element rule. Prosecutors responded to Blakely by becoming more stringent to defendants in making many prosecution decisions, such as pleading guilty from a felony to a misdemeanor. Furthermore, I found no evidence that Blakely significantly changed defendant’s minimum sentence lengths, suggesting that the spillover effects of the element rule may have offset its direct effects in protecting defendants against illegitimate punishment. The results highlight that broad prosecutorial discretion may undermine the effectiveness of external regulation of criminal prosecution.