Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2018, vol. 10, issue 3, 171-205

Abstract: Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. 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-codes: D83 I23 J13 J15 K42 L83 Z21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: DOI: 10.1257/app.20160390
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/app.20160390 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... ZCF4Qv2Ee84fnmKPJDb2 (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... pv3fgO002TTmfkRmsFbU (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejapp:v:10:y:2018:i:3:p:171-205

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics is currently edited by Alexandre Mas

More articles in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().