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The Medicare Secondary Payer Act of 1980 and its subsequent amendments require that insurers and self‐insured companies report settlements, awards, and judgments that involve a Medicare beneficiary to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The parties then may be required to compensate CMS for its conditional payments. In a simple settlement model, this makes settlement less likely. Also, the reporting delays and uncertainty regarding the size of these conditional payments are likely to further frustrate the settlement process. We provide results, using data from a large insurer, showing that, on average, implementation of the MSP reporting amendments led to a delay in the resolution of disputes involving auto accidents of about six months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1957, New York courts have required contingent fee lawyers to file "closing statements" that disclose settlement amounts, lawyers' fees, an accounting of expenses, and other information. This Article provides a preliminary analysis of these data for the period 2004-2013. Among this Article's findings are that settlement rates in New York state courts are very high (84%) relative to previous studies; that very few cases are resolved by dispositive motions; that litigated cases and settled cases have almost exactly the same average recovery; that median litigation expenses, other than attorney's fees, are 3% of gross recovery; that claims are disproportionately from poor neighborhoods; and that attorneys' fees are almost always one-third of net recovery, which is the maximum allowed by law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English rule prescribes that the loser of a lawsuit pays the winner's litigation costs. Previous research on the English rule finds that plaintiffs win more often at trial, receive higher awards, and receive larger settlements. Theory predicts that the English rule discourages settlement by raising the threshold payment necessary for settlement. In this paper, we reexamine the Florida experiment with the English rule by placing bounds on the selection effects. We find that the mean and median settlement amount increases. Collectively these findings are consistent with the predictions of the simplest models of the English rule's impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the quasi-randomization of alcohol consumption created by state-level alcohol prohibition laws passed in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Using a large dataset of World War II enlistees, we exploit the differential timing of these laws to examine their effects on adult educational attainment, obesity, and height. We find statistically significant effects for education and obesity that do not appear to be the result of pre-existing trends. Our findings add to the growing body of economic studies that examine the long-run impacts of in utero and childhood environmental conditions. ( JEL I18, D10, N41, N42) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how stock ownership impacts which judges and U.S. Supreme Court justices hear legal cases involving publicly traded corporations in America as of 2015, and it mentions U.S. federal judicial recusal rules, as well as the nation's Supreme Court and the role of transparency in the law. The U.S. federal judicial process is examined, as well as blind trusts, judicial ethics, and the legal aspects of mutual funds. Disqualifications of judges are also assessed.

The impact of medical malpractice reforms on the average size of malpractice payments in specific physician specialties is unknown and subject to debate. We analyzed a national sample of malpractice claims for the period 1985-2010, merged with information on state liability reforms, to estimate the impact of state noneconomic damages caps on average malpractice payment size for physicians overall and for ten different specialty categories. We then compared how the effects differed according to the restrictiveness of the cap ($250,000 versus $500,000). We found that, overall, noneconomic damages caps reduced average payments by $42,980 (15 percent), compared to having no cap at all. A more restrictive $250,000 cap reduced average payments by $59,331 (20 percent), and a less restrictive $500,000 cap had no significant effect, compared to no cap at all. The effect of the caps overall varied according to specialty, with the largest impact being on claims involving pediatricians and the smallest on claims involving surgical subspecialties and ophthalmologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal cases are won or lost on the basis of statistical discrimination measures, but workers' perceptions of discriminatory behavior are important for understanding labor supply decisions. Workers who believe that they have been discriminated against are more likely to leave their employers, and workers' perceptions of discrimination likely drive formal complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet the relationship between statistical and self-assessed measures of discrimination is far from obvious. We expand on the previous literature by using data from the After the J.D. study to compare standard Blinder-Oaxaca measures of earnings discrimination to self-reported measures of client discrimination, other work-related discrimination, and harassment. Our results indicate that conventional measures of earnings discrimination are not closely linked to the racial and gender bias that new lawyers believe they have experienced on the job. Moreover, statistical earnings discrimination does not explain the disparity in self-assessed bias across gender and racial groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much should judges be paid? We first survey the considerable history of the debate and identify the implicit causal claims made about the effect of judicial pay. We find that claims about the effect of pay on the composition and quality of the judiciary have remained remarkably similar over the past two hundred years. In contrast, claims about the effect of pay on judicial independence have changed as the meaning of judicial independence itself has shifted We take advantage of the large variation in real salaries and opportunity costs for state appellate court judges across states from 1977 to 2007 to empirically test these claims. We find that judicial salaries have a small but significant effect on the likelihood of exit and thus the length of judicial tenure, and a small effect on the background of judges that join the appellate bench. A more limited analysis of California trial court judges finds far more sensitivity to pay, however, suggesting that trial and appellate court judges may behave differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take advantage of the fortuitous randomization of trial outcome to provide a novel strategy to identify the deterrent effect exclusive of incapacitation. We compare the post-sentencing criminal activity of criminals who were convicted of a strikeable offense with those who were tried for a strikeable offense but convicted of a nonstrikeable offense. As a robustness check, we also make this comparison in states without three-strikes laws. The identification strategy lets us estimate the deterrent effect nonparametrically using data solely from the three-strikes era. We find that California's three-strike legislation significantly reduces felony arrest rates among the class of criminals with two strikes by 17-20 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses data available for researchers interested in the U.S. civil justice system and illustrates the uses of the various datasets with some interesting findings. One fundamental question is whether tort awards are rising. The roots of the tort crisis have traditionally been traced to the 1960s and 1970s, when tort law shifted from a standard where damages were only owed after negligence was proven to strict liability, where no proof of negligence was needed. There are three especially useful sources for cross-sectional research on tort cases: the Federal data set, Jury Verdict Research, and the Civil Justice Survey of State Courts, 1992, 1996, 2001. A limitation of the Civil Justice Survey data is that because it was constructed to examine large urban counties, it covers only 21-22 states. Most of the data sets on specific types of civil action deal with medical malpractice, although limited data are also available on auto accidents, product liability and certain other specific areas. A second useful data set on medical malpractice arose out of the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986. The vast majority of the payment amounts in the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) are settlements, a great improvement over data sets that contain only trials. For example, NPDB data showed that medical malpractice payments per doctor vary widely by state, ranging from a low of $5,174 in Wisconsin to $30,841 in Pennsylvania.

The Coase theorem presents two criteria for evaluating regulation: regulations efficiency relative to private solutions and how the regulation affects the distribution of wealth. Previous studies of the impact of municipal zoning have focused on Coase's first criteria: whether zoning raises land values overall. This study estimates the transfer of wealth between owners of existing homes that results from the creation of a municipal zoning ordinance. We find that property best suited to residential use gains in value while property with relatively higher potential as commercial property experiences a decline in the value. We find that zoning is distributive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the forces that explain why trial awards differ across the United States. In 23 states judges are elected and in 10 they are elected via partisan elections. Elections have two important effects. First, defendants are often out-of-state nonvoters while plaintiffs are typically in-state voters. We predict, therefore, that elected judges will redistribute wealth from out-of-state businesses to in-state plaintiffs. Second, the realities of campaign financing require judges to seek and accept campaign funding from trial lawyers, who uniformly are interested in larger awards. We hypothesize that these two forces cause awards to be larger in states where the judiciary is elected rather than appointed. We also hypothesize that the demand for redistribution will increase as poverty increases and, thus, that awards will be larger in states with greater poverty. Using a sample of over 7,000 cases across 48 of the 50 states, we find significant evidence in support of these hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent growth in Medicaid spending has forced states to look for ways to slow the program's rate of growth. Under the Medicaid program's rules, state governments must submit a waiver to the federal government in order to implement a cost-saving program. The time required to process a waiver varies from 14 days to over three years. This study examines the determinants of the time it takes to process a waiver and the number of revisions required before final approval. The results indicate that an increase in the tenure of the state's delegation to the House oversight committee reduces the time to approval for Freedom of Choice waivers. However, more liberal committee members appear to delay waivers. The results complement the existing literature on the pork barrel by showing that seniority on a committee is an important determinant--not only of monetary benefits but also of nonmonetary benefits. (JEL H51, I 18) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Targeting is the practice of inspecting firms most likely to violate a regulation. This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of targeting in regulatory compliance. I propose that self-reporting by a firm is used to demonstrate that firms are willing to cooperate. The results indicate that there is a one-quarter penalty period following a violation. Inspections are also determined by the economic situation of the surrounding community, demonstrating that targeting opens the door to interestgroup influence. Inspections that detect violations encourage selfreporting, showing that firms demonstrate their desire to cooperate with regulators by disclosing violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the U.S. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To examine the impact of Medicaid prior authorization for atypical antipsychotics on the prevalence of schizophrenia among the prison population. Study, Design: We collected drug-level information on prior authorization restrictions from Medicaid programs in 30 states to determine which states had prior authorization requirements before 2004. We linked the regulatory data to a survey of prison inmates conducted in 2004., Methods: We used a sample of 16,844 inmates from a nationally representative survey and analyzed the data using cross-sectional regression. To capture the impact of prior authorization, we estimated 2 models: the first included an indicator variable for states requiring prior authorization, and a second model used per capita atypical usage., Results: Evidence indicated that prior authorization restrictions on atypical antipsychotics are associated with an increase in the odds of a schizophrenic resident being imprisoned in a state. State-level prior authorization requirements for atypical antipsychotics are associated with a 2.7% increase in the likelihood that an imprisoned inmate displays psychotic symptoms, and a 1.25 increase in the likelihood that an inmate was previously diagnosed with schizophrenia by a physician. Higher state-level atypical prescriptions per capita are also associated with lower likelihood of psychotic symptoms and of prior schizophrenia diagnosis among prisoners., Conclusions: Prior authorization requirements for atypical antipsychotics, which are designed to reduce healthcare costs, are associated with greater prevalence of mental illness within the criminal justice system.This association raises important questions about whether increased costs to the criminal justice system might mitigate or offset prescription drug savings created by prior authorization requirements.