Three essays in economics

Diaz Klaassen, Felipe

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120400 Copy

Description

Title

Three essays in economics

Author(s)

Diaz Klaassen, Felipe

Issue Date

2023-04-23

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Thornton, Rebecca

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Thornton, Rebecca

Committee Member(s)

• Bartik, Alexander
• Garin, Andrew
• Marx, Benjamin

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Monetary Sanctions
• Criminal Justice
• Quorum Rules

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays that study the design of criminal justice and electoral institutions, using both theoretical and empirical methods to examine them. In Chapter 1, I study the causal effect of fines and court fees on criminal reoffending for low-level misdemeanants by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of judges in North Carolina. I find strong deterrent effects for monetary sanctions, with the imposition of any fines or fees reducing the likelihood of reoffending by 9 percentage points within two years of the original offense. Treatment effects are weakly negative for almost all defendant types, contradicting the hypothesis that financial obligations induce poorer defendants to engage in crimes entailing economic gains, although I do find evidence of increased financial distress for poorer defendants. Reductions in recidivism are driven almost entirely by defendants living in wealthier neighborhoods and first time defendants. Additionally, using generic machine learning methods to fully characterize treatment effect heterogeneity, I compare alternative allocations of fines and court fees and find significant improvements, reducing reoffending by 20%, when prioritizing fines and fees to wealthier defendants. In Chapter 2, coauthored with Ricardo Pique, I examine the design of referenda. Quorum rules are commonly used to increase turnout in referenda. The literature has argued that in a single-issue referendum these may actually increase the incentive to abstain among status-quo supporters. I extend the ethical voter framework to analyze the effect of quorum rules when each of two political groups supports a different ballot measure. Bundling these two propositions in a single ballot can mitigate strategic abstention and help sustain no-quorum rules levels of turnout. This holds for both approval and participation quorum rules, which I show produce equivalent changes in voting behavior under both a single and a two-issue setting. Overall, the results show how the effects of referendum features such as ballot-measure bundling and quorum rules are interdependent Finally, in Chapter 3, jointly with Rebecca Thornton, I study the impact of courtroom agents–-judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys–-on criminal justice outcomes. Despite accounting for criminal charge attributes and prior legal involvement, I observe significant variation in outcomes across courtroom agents. Adapting methods from the value-added literature in education research, I measure the (negative) influence of these agents on key defendant outcomes using administrative data from North Carolina. Courtroom agents account for 1% to 2% of outcome variation, except for case durations in both District and Superior Courts and sentence lengths in Superior Courts, where they account for between 12% and 50%. In essence, courtroom agents considerably influence case durations and sentence lengths in Superior Courts. Replacing the top 5% more "influential'' courtroom agents with average ones could reduce an average defendant’s sentence length by approximately 2.5 years.

Graduation Semester

2023-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Felipe Diaz Klaassen

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