Search

Students in private schools routinely outperform those in public schools both in the United States and around the world. But do private schools make students better or do they simply cream skim better students? In this article I take advantage of the remarkable fact that in many districts in India a majority of students attend private schools. As the private share of school enrollment increases, cream skimming becomes less plausible as the explanation for a higher rate of achievement in private schools. Evidence for cream skimming is found when the private share of schooling is low, in the range of 0-15%, and thus private schools have a large public pool from which to skim. But the private effect on achievement does not appear to diminish greatly even in districts where more than 70% of students are in private schools. Most importantly, mean scores taken over the entire population of students, private and public, increase with the share of private schooling. These findings support a significant productivity effect of private schools. ( JEL I25, I2, L33) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the reintegration of criminals with civil society. It offers an overview of the Fugitive Safe Surrender (FSS) program of the U.S. Marshals Service which had arranged for the voluntary surrender of 35,000 individuals and examines a study on 20,000 of the people who responded to the FSS program. The author relates how fugitives adjust their behavior to avoid capture and how a flexible criminal justice system helps in their reintegration.

The amended Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act requires efficacy certification for a drug's initial uses (“on-label”), but does not require certification before physicians may prescribe the drug for subsequent uses (“off-label”). Does it make sense to require FDA efficacy certification for new drugs but not for new uses of old drugs? Using a sequential online survey, we carried on a “virtual conversation” with some 500 physicians. The survey asked whether efficacy requirements should be imposed on off-label uses; almost all physicians said no. It asked whether the efficacy requirements for initial uses should be dropped, and most physicians said no. We then asked respondents whether opposing efficacy requirements in one case but not the other involved an inconsistency. In response, we received hundreds of written commentaries. We organize and discuss these commentaries with an eye to understanding how the medical market certifies off-label drug uses and how this compares to FDA certification. Does off-label medicine use suggest that efficacy requirements should be placed on new uses of old drugs? Does it suggest that efficacy requirements on new drugs should be lifted? We explore these questions, and ask whether the response of many of the doctors exhibits the familiar behavior bias toward the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the rise and decline of privateering in the U.S. It is stated that a privateer is a ship licensed by the U.S. government to harass British vessels and confiscate their cargoes. Privateering system occurred during the War of 1812 and played a critical role in the American Revolution which consists of approximately 700 commissioned ships. It is stated that privateering brought revenue and goods into the country. Privateering has declined after the War of 1812 thus, ransoming and parole had once been common in the country. It is concluded that the government's growing power made the end of privateering inevitable.

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.

Focuses on the role of United States Food and Drug Administration in regulating the practice of off-label prescribing. Extent of off label prescribing in the country; Costs and benefits of off-label prescribing; Accounts of advertising ban for off-label uses of pharmaceuticals.

The election of 1860 was one of the most important and contentious elections in US history. It was also one of the most interesting. Four candidates from three different parties battled for the presidency and all four received a significant number of votes. We ask whether Lincoln's victory was sound, or was it due to a fluke in the electoral system? Did a Lincoln win plausibly represent the will of the voters or would a different voting system have represented their preferences more accurately? Would the outcome have been the same had one or more of the candidates dropped out of the race? These and other questions are answered using new graphical techniques which let us assess voter preferences more accurately. Using these techniques, we are able to show, in a single figure, the outcome of every positional voting system, as well as all possible approval voting outcomes. By comparing the outcome under plurality rule to the outcomes which would have occurred under other voting systems, we conclude that Stephen Douglas, not Lincoln, was plausibly the candidate who best represented the preferences of the voters. [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]

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]