Appellate Supervision of Lower Court Decision-Making: Evidence from Asylum Adjudication.

This paper explores how supervision by an administrative appeals court, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), influences the decision-making of lower court immigration judges in asylum cases. We exploit as a natural experiment the BIA streamlining regulations of 2002 and 2003. These regulations resulted in more cursory review by a Board with fewer, more conservative members. Using a dataset that contains every asylum decision between 1994 and 2004, we explore how the level and dispersion of asylum grant rates across immigration judges changed before and after BIA streamlining. To identify judge effects, we rely on the fact that, at least within a particular immigration court, asylum cases are randomly assigned across judges. Our results, estimated from a random effects probit model, indicate that both the level and variation in asylum grant rates fell coincident with BIA streamlining. These patterns cannot be attributed solely to other times trends such as changes in country conditions, the September 11th terrorist attacks, or changes in the composition of immigration judges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]