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We study corporate philanthropy using an original database that includes firm-level data on dollar giving, giving priorities, governance, and managerial involvement in giving programs. Results provide some support for the theory that giving enhances shareholder value, as firms in the same industry tend to adopt similar giving practices and firms that advertise more intensively also give more to charity. But much of our evidence indicates that agency costs play a prominent role in explaining corporate giving. Firms with larger boards of directors are associated with significantly more cash giving and with the establishment of corporate foundations. Consistent with effective monitoring by creditors, firms with higher debt-to-value ratios give less cash to charities and are less likely to establish foundations. The empirical work considers the impact of industry regulation on giving and controls for state philanthropy laws and fiduciary responsibility laws.

Few issues are more contentious for local communities than industrial pollution. When local industries pollute, lawmakers and regulators must balance two primary concerns: economic prosperity and the environment. The role of political pressure is well-documented in environmental policy. What is less clear is the role jurisdictional or boundary considerations play in determining the implementation of environmental laws. Anecdotal evidence suggests that local regulators are more lenient in their treatment of polluters when the incidence of pollution falls partially on those outside the state. One explanation for such behavior is that regulators take actions to maximize political support. This paper tests this jurisdictional model using Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data from 1987 to 1996. We find that facilities' emissions into the air and water are systematically higher in counties that border other states. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that jurisdictional considerations are an important determinant of pollution incidence

We investigate the impact of the race and income of the jury pool on trial awards. We find that the average tort award increases as black and Hispanic county population rates increase and especially as black and Hispanic county poverty rates increase. An increase in the black countypoverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise the average personal injury tort award by 3 to 10 percent. An increase in the Hispanic county-poverty rate of 1 percentage point tends to raise awards by as much as 7 percent although this effect is less well estimated. These effects imply that forum shopping for high-poverty minority counties could raise awards by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Average awards fall with increases in white (non-black, non-Hispanic) poverty rates in two of our datasets, thus making these findings even more surprising. Awards increase with black and Hispanic county-poverty rates even after controlling for a wide variety of other potential causes.

It has long since been established that children raised by single parents are more likely to become sexually active, commit illegal acts, and use illegal drugs at young ages. What has not been determined is whether or not there is a causal effect associated with the disintegration of the family. Would these children have been more likely to participate in 'deviant' behavior even if their family structure had remained intact? This study provides evidence in favor of a negative causal impact of single-parent status. Using state-level divorce law changes to instrument for years that the biological father lives in the household, we find that youth who spend part of their childhood/youth living in a household that does not include their biological father are more likely to smoke regularly, become sexually active, and be convicted of a crime.

Most studies of the deterrence effect of incarceration treat a year in prison as having the same deterrence effect regardless of the conditions of incarceration. In contrast, we estimate both the impact of custody rate and prison location changes on female crime rates. We take advantage of the natural experiment created by recent expansions of the female penal system; many states witnessed a rapid doubling of prison capacity. The physical expansion of the penal system decreased the distance to prisons for some cities while increasing it for others. Movement in both directions is particularly helpful because it ensures that we are not identifying relationships off coincidental one-directional trends. Our results suggest that prison location has a sizable deterrence effect. Increasing the average distance to a woman's prison by 40 miles reduces the female violent crime rate by approximately 7 percent.

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the US jury system needs to be 'fixed.' Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show that there are large differences in mean awards and win rates across juries and judges. But if the types of cases coming before juries are different from those coming before judges, mean award and win rates may differ even if judges and juries would make the same decisions when faced with the same cases. We find that most of the difference in judge and jury mean awards can be explained by differences in the sample of cases coming before judges and juries. On some dimensions, however, there remain robust and suggestive differences between judges and juries.

After forty years of school consolidation, the preponderance of the evidence, including the results presented in this paper, suggest that the race to reap returns to scale and specialization in education may have come at a high price. This paper uses newly available STAR test score data from California to explore the relationship between school size and the distribution of test scores across elementary, middle, and high schools. We find that school size has a statistically significant and economically large impact on school performance. For example, the probability that an average suburban high school is dominated by low scorers rises from 47% to 71% as the school grows from 200 to 800 students per grade.

Politicians are not neutral maximizers of the public good, they respond to incentives just like other individuals. We apply the same reasoning to those politicians in robes called judges. We argue that elected judges, particularly partisan elected judges, have an incentive to redistribute wealth from out-of-state defendants (non-voters) to instate plaintiffs (voters). The partisan electoral hypothesis is tested first using data on 75,000 tort awards from across the states. We control for differences in injuries, state incomes, poverty levels, selection effects and other factors that may cause awards to differ across the states. One difference which appears difficult to control for is that each state has its own body of tort law. We take advantage of a peculiar aspect of American Federalism to make this distinction. In cases involving citizens of different states, aptly called diversity of citizenship cases, Federal judges apply state law to decide disputes. Diversity of citizenship cases allow us to test whether differences in awards are caused by differences in electoral systems or differences in state law. The evidence from the cross-state regressions and from the diversity of citizenship cases, strongly supports the partisan election hypothesis. In cases involving out-of-state defendants and in-state plaintiffs the average award (conditional on winning) is 42% higher in partisan than in non-partisan states; approximately 2/3 rds of the larger award is due to a bias against out-of-state defendants and the remainder due to generally higher awards against businesses in partisan states.